of those acts we call vice draw their stimulus and pleasure from the
impulses that subserve this sustaining fact of our being, and they are
vicious only because they evade or spoil their proper end. This is
really no new discovery at all, only the stripping bare of it is new.
In nearly every religious and moral system in the world indeed, the
predominant mass of the exposition of sin and saving virtue positively
or negatively centres upon birth. Positively in the enormous stresses,
the sacramental values which are concentrated upon marriage and the
initial circumstances of being, and negatively in a thousand
significant repudiations. Even when the devotee most strenuously
renounces this world and all its works, when St. Anthony flees into the
desert or the pious Durtal wrestles in his cell, when the pale nun
prays in vigil and the hermit mounts his pillar, it is Celibacy, that
great denial of life, that sings through all their struggle, it is this
business of births as the central fact of life they still have most in
mind.

This is not human life merely, it is all life. This living world, as
the New Republican will see it, is no more than a great birth-place, an
incessant renewal, an undying fresh beginning and unfolding of life.
Take away this fact of birth and what is there remaining? A world
without flowers, without the singing of birds, without the freshness of
youth, with a spring that brings no seedlings and a year that bears no
harvest, without beginnings and without defeats, a vast stagnation, a
universe of inconsequent matter--Death. Not only does the substance of
life vanish if we eliminate births and all that is related to births,
but whatever remains, if anything remains, of aesthetic and
intellectual and spiritual experience, collapses utterly and falls
apart, when this essential substratum of all experience is withdrawn.
So at any rate the world presents itself in the view the New Republican