mind--or what St. Paul calls a "soul"--and a spirit. "Soul" is a word whose
meaning we have altered so much that I must define what I mean by it and
what I think St. Paul meant by it. The soul includes the emotions and the
intellect, that part of a man which is not wholly physical and which is not
entirely spiritual. Everyone has a soul. And every one of you, however
much you ignore your body, however much you may tell me your body does not
really exist, have got a body too. You have to eat and drink and sleep,
just like the most material alderman, though you may eat less. And you
cannot base a real moral standard on the pretence that you have not got a
body. You are, on one side of your nature, physical, material, animal; but
you have got a mind and emotions or "soul"; and you have got a spirit. To
act as though you had not is just as futile as to pretend that you have
not got a body. "Where there is no vision the people perish." "Mankind
is incurably religious." "All the world seeks after God." Those proverbs,
those sayings, which are familiar to all, crystallize the world's
experience that human beings are spiritual beings. If there is any person
who thinks that he is merely an intellect and a body, I will direct the
attention of that intellect of his away from himself to the race, and
I will remind him that practically no race in the world has ever been
entirely without the sense of God; that, however hard men try, they have
never been able to cure humanity of its spiritual hunger; that though our
gods are often gross and earthy, even diabolical, yet they are spiritual,
and they are the proof that man is spiritually aware; that he is a spirit
as well as a body and a soul. Now I say that anyone who tries to base his
morality on the assumption that he is only a body, or only an intelligence,
or only a spirit, has got a false standard, and his morality is a dishonest
kind of morality. The body will avenge itself on those who ignore it.
Psychologists are teaching us that the mind will avenge itself on those who
ignore it. And this is just as true of the spirit. Where there is no vision
the people do perish. Your spiritual nature avenges itself on those who try
to rule it out. Base your morality either on the exclusion of any part of
your being, or on the assumption that what you do concerns yourself alone;
and you will find that you are violating human nature. It is useless for
you to act wrongly and to affirm that you do it "because human nature is
what it is." When you do so, you are assuming that human nature is _not_
what it is; that is to say you assume that it is purely physical, when, in
fact, it is three-fold--body, soul and spirit. You can see for yourselves,
I think, how this violation of human nature works itself out. For animals
promiscuity is not wrong. When they treat themselves as purely animals
they are basing their moral standard, if I may put it so, on bed-rock; they
_are_ animals, and therefore they behave as animals without violating any
law of their being. As they rise higher in the scale of evolution their
morals become nobler. There are moral standards among the lower animals,
but they remain at a certain level, and rightly so. No animal is harmed by
behaving like an animal, for in doing so he obeys the law of his being; but
if human beings behave as though they were animals, what happens? They find
to their horror that they have let loose upon the world detestable, hideous
and devastating diseases. Do you think that medicine will ever be able
to rid the world of what are called the diseases of immorality as long as
immorality remains? I do not believe it. I know that you can do much for
individual sufferers, though you cannot do one-tenth part of what doctors
thought they were going to be able to do, eight or nine years ago. And, of
course, whatever we can do, we must and ought to do. But we do not reach
the root of the matter by medicine.
No scientist can tell us how small-pox or tuberculosis or rheumatism first
entered the world; but any scientist can tell us that by wrong living,
wrong housing, wrong feeding, we can breed and spread and perpetuate
disease. In other words, we are diseased not because we obey the laws
of our nature but because we violate them: and though we can take the
individual sufferer and (sometimes) cure him, we shall not get rid of the
disease until we have learnt to obey those laws and to live rightly.
In just the same way the diseases of vice, though no one can say how they
first came into the world, continue and flourish, not because of human
nature, but because we violate some law of our own nature in what we do. We
may even cure the individual; we may see a thousand struck and a thousand
guilty escape; the fact remains that these diseases are bred in the swamp
of immorality, just as certainly as malaria is bred in the mosquito-haunted
pools of the malaria swamp. Drain the swamp, and you get rid of the
malaria, for there is no longer any place for the malaria-bearing mosquito
to breed. Drain the swamp of immorality, and you get rid of venereal
disease, because there is no longer a place where these diseases can breed.
Live rightly, and your nature will respond in health. When human beings
elect to make their relations with one another promiscuous--when, that is
to say, they treat themselves as animals--they are not obeying, they are
violating the law of their own being; for they are not animals only, and
to treat themselves as such is to disobey the law of their own nature. And
disobedience reacts in disease.
So again, the relations of men and women are of the mind as well as of the
body and the spirit. You cannot rule out your mind, and I think that those
who believe, as many do today, not indeed in a merely animal promiscuity,
but in rather casual relations between men and women--experiments, if you
like, men and women passing from one union to another--rule out the fact
that a human being has a mind, a memory and foresight; that our being
includes a past, and, in a sense, includes a future also; and when you try
to divorce your physical experience from your intellectual and emotional
being you are again violating the law of your own nature.
I remember asking one of the most happily married women that I know to put
into words, if she could, the reason why she believed that married people,
married lovers, should not have gone through other relationships with other
people before they gave themselves to one another. I asked her to express
in words what seemed to her immoral. She wrote this: "In the ideal union
between God and man, we know that man must give the fulness of his being,
body, mind and spirit, throughout his whole life, to God, and that anything
less than this, though it may be fine and noble, does fall short of
perfection. It is the same with the human love of men and women. The
'fulness of our being' which we desire to give to our lover consists not
only in what we are at any given moment but in what we have been in the
past, what we may become in the future. And so in the formation of
merely temporary unions the highest and deepest unity can never be fully
achieved." She went on to say: "When we have passed beyond the physical
sphere we shall be able, like God, to give ourselves equally to all; but
while we are in the flesh we cannot share ourselves equally with all, and
any attempt to do so lowers the standard of perfect human love." I like
that, because it is based again on a loyal acceptance of human nature. We
are not yet as God in the sense that, being wholly spirit, we can share
ourselves equally with all. We do still live in bodies, and we have in this
life memory and prevision, and surely that is indeed an ideal union, if we
are looking for the highest, which is able to give its past and its future
as well as its present, so that the whole personality is involved, in
that act of union, and that anything short of that is at least not quite
perfect. Human beings are still in the body, and are yet soul and spirit in
that body, and must take both into account. Divorce the physical from the
spiritual in yourself, and you are violating yourself. Divorce the physical
from the spiritual in someone else--you who perhaps say: "I myself love
such a man, such a woman, with the best part of myself; what I do with
another is of no importance"--you violate the nature of that other from
whom you take what is physical, and leave what is spiritual as though it
were not there.
Your life, like your body, is too highly organized, too sensitive, too knit
together by memories and prevision for you to leave behind you anything
that has really entered into your life. It is a shoddy and superficial
nature that passes easily from experience to experience, and when you look
at such you can see how shallower still it becomes. It is the deeper and
the loftier nature that cannot enter into any human relationship and then
pass away from it altogether unchanged. And even that shoddy, that poor,
that mean little soul which seems to pass so lightly from one experience to
another does not really altogether escape. Some mark is left upon the soul,
some association remains in the memory; and again and again marriages have
been wrecked because a man has taken the associations of the gutter into
the sanctuary of his home. Unwillingly, with an imagination that fain would
reject the stain, he has injured, he has insulted the love that has now
come to him, the most precious thing on earth, because he has not known how
to do otherwise; because all the associations of passion have been to him
degraded, smirched, treated frivolously in the past. It is true of men; it
is also true of women. I do not know of anything that makes understanding
harder between two people than the fact that one has had experiences and
associations which the other has not had and does not understand, because
they are on an entirely different level. These create between them,
with all the desire for understanding in the world, a barrier of
misunderstanding and incomprehension, which is all the more fatal because
it is so intangible, so obscure, so hard to put into words, so often
actually unconscious or subconscious in the mind of one or of the other.
Again, you must not think that you are altogether spirit, and here perhaps
it is the woman who is more apt to sin than the man. How often have I
talked to women who speak of the physical side of love as though it were
something base and unworthy! Such a conception of passion is inhuman, and
therefore it is not really moral. A woman who thinks of this sacrament of
love, for which perhaps the man who loves her has kept himself clean all
his life, as a base thing, and who treats it as though it were a concession
to something base in a man's nature, instead of being the very consecration
of body and soul at once, the sacrament of union, one of the loveliest
things in human nature--such a woman gives as great a shock to what is
sacred and lovely in her husband's nature as he when he brings with him
into his marriage the associations of the street. It is as hard, it is as
insulting, it makes marriage as difficult in understanding, one way as the
other. For it is not true that our bodies are vile and base; they are the
temples of the Holy Spirit.
Or if you think that you can stand alone, that what you do is the concern
of no one else, that your life is a solitary thing, so solitary that no man
or woman is concerned, no one but yourself, and you may sin alone--there
again you misunderstand. You cannot stand alone, and nothing that you say
or think or do leaves the world unchanged. Is that difficult to believe in
these days, when psychology is teaching us how all-important thought is?
Ought you to find it hard to believe that what you do in the utmost secrecy
affects others, since it affects you, and no man lives to himself alone?
I do not wish to exaggerate. I have a horror of those books and people who
speak in exaggerated terms of any kind of sexual lapse. I am persuaded that
human beings can rise from such mistakes, and rise much more easily than
from the subtler spiritual sins which have so much more respectable an air.
But yet do not sin under the impression that what you do concerns yourself
alone. Do not use, for your own satisfaction only, powers which were given
you for creation and for the world.
But this, you may say, is not the accepted standard of morality. That is a
matter rather of laws and ceremonies. And people begin to ask; "What real
difference can a mere ceremony make?" It does not make any difference to
the morality of your relationships with your fellow men and women. Nothing
that is immoral becomes moral because it has been done under a legal
contract, or consecrated by a rite. There, I think, is where the world has
gone so wrong. The idea that a relation that is selfish, cruel, mercenary,
becomes moral because someone has said some words over you, and you have
signed a register--what a farcical idea! How on earth does that change
anything at all? The morality of all civil or religious ceremony lies, I
think, in this--that by accepting and going through it, you accept the fact
that your love does concern others besides yourself; it will concern your
children; and beyond that, it concerns the world. You are right when you
ask your friends to come and rejoice with you at your wedding. It is the
concern of all the world when people love each other, and it is the failure
of _love_ that concerns them when marriage is a failure. Such failure
chills the atmosphere; it shakes our faith in love as the supreme power in
the universe; it makes us all waver in our allegiance to constancy and
love when love fails. It is a joyful thing when people love. "All the
world loves a lover." It is an old saying, but what a true one! It _is_ our
concern when people nobly and loyally love each other, it is the concern of
the community, and those who take upon themselves these public vows seem to
me to have a more truly moral conception of love than those who say: "This
is our affair only; it is not the affair of the State or the affair of the
Church." But the actual ceremony must be the expression of a moral feeling
such as that. It cannot in itself make moral what is immoral! The old
idea that if a woman was seduced by a man she was "made honest" by the man
marrying her is essentially immoral. Very likely all that she knew about
the man was that she could not trust him, and to suppose that we can set
right what is wrong by tying them together for the rest of their lives is
to imagine an absurdity and to establish a lie.
Or take the case from another point of view. I have two in my mind at this
moment, who for some reason (a reason not very far to seek if you read our
English marriage laws) came to the conclusion that it is not right to place
oneself in such a position as a married woman is in under English law. I am
not discussing whether they were right or wrong; I say that quite sincere
and moral people do come to that conclusion sometimes, and so did these
two. They lived together, therefore, without being legally married. They
were absolutely faithful to each other; their love was as responsible, as
dignified, as true as any such relation could be. It lacked to my mind one
thing--the sense of a wider responsibility--but then it had very much that
many legal marriages have not. Those two people are put outside society;
it is made almost impossible for them to earn their living; and at last
in despair they go to the registry office, and sign their names in a book.
What difference has been made in their relation to each other? Absolutely
none. They are no more convinced of the right and duty of the community
to be concerned with marriage than they were before. They have yielded
to coercion. Their moral standard, good or bad, is precisely what it was;
their relation to each other wholly unchanged. But in the eyes of the world
they have become respectable, they are "moral," they can be received
back into the bosom of society. And why? Because they have gone through a
ceremony in which they do not believe!
Every marriage in the world probably lacks something of perfection. There
are no perfect human beings, and, therefore, hardly, perhaps, a perfect
marriage; and to my mind those who do not admit the concern of the
community in their marriage do lack something. But to suppose that those
people are immoral, when others who live together, legally licensed to do
so, in selfishness, in infidelity, for financial reasons, or for social
reasons, are moral is fundamentally dishonest. When a woman sells her body
for money, do you think that it makes it moral that she does it in a church
or in a registry office? Is there one whit of difference, morally, between
the prostitution that has no legal recognition and the prostitution that
has? Is it anything but prostitution to sell yourself for money, whether
you are a man or a woman? Do you imagine that because you have a contract
to protect you while you do it, you are doing what is moral? If you marry
for any reason but love--for experience, to "complete your nature"--without
much regard to the man or woman you marry, or to the children you bring
into the world, are you not exploiting human nature just as certainly,
though not so brutally, as a man who buys a woman in the street? It is not
so base a form of exploitation, God knows; that I admit; but when there
is _any_ element of exploitation in the bargain it is not made more truly
moral because it happens to be blessed in a church or registered in an
office. The legal ceremony must be the outcome of a morality which makes
you realize that what you do affects other people, that what you do
most profoundly affects the children that you hope to have, and that the
community has both an interest and a responsibility in all this. That is
"moral." But if the relationship thus to be legalized is not moral, it is
dishonest to pretend that it can be made so by any ceremony which those
concerned may undergo.
But, you will say, we cannot peer into other people's lives and judge them
in this kind of way. How are we to know? How are we, who have many friends,
many neighbours, on whom our standards must react, to judge their lives?
We can tell who has gone through a legal ceremony and who refuses to do
so. That is a nice convenient rule by which we can judge and condemn such
people. But we cannot go poking into people's lives and studying their
motives and judging their fundamental moral standards! No, you cannot. Why
should you? This little set of iron rules makes it very easy to judge, does
it not? But why do you desire it to be easy to judge? You and I know how
infinite are the gradations between the most noble kind of chastity and
the most ignoble kind of immorality; but which of us is to create a rigid
standard and measure our friends and acquaintances against it? We do not
do it with the other virtues: why do we desire to do it with this one?
Take such a virtue as truth. Conceive the crystalline sincerity of some
truth-loving minds, realize that some have such a devotion to truth that
the faintest shadow of insincerity--not a lie, but the merest shadow of
insincerity in the depths of their hearts--is abhorrent to them. Consider
the infinite gradations between that mind and the mind which takes a lie
for truth, a mind that is rotten with corruption, that does not know how to
think straight, let alone care to speak straight. You do not draw up your
little set of rules and say: "I do not call on that person because he does
not speak the truth; and I won't have anything to do with that one--such
persons are outside the social pale altogether because their conception of
truth is different from mine!"
No, you keep your admiration for the truth-loving and the sincere. You
recognize that people have different standards about what is truth. One
person will never tell a lie under any circumstances: another will reckon
himself free to tell a lie to save a third, or to preserve a confidence;
will you judge which is the more honourable of the two? Where is your
little set of rules? You cannot have one. You shrink from the person who
is morally dishonest and corrupt; you worship the person who loves truth as
Darwin loved it. But between those two extremes what an infinite variety of
attainment! Who can say: "These people are moral because they are married,
and those are immoral, they are not married?" It is not true, it is not
honest, to make these rules our measure. They do not meet the realities
of human nature, and I contend that we, who have known souls so chaste
and lovely that they make us in love with virtue, do far more to raise
the moral standard of humanity by seeking to imitate such people than by
setting up our little codes of rules and condemning or justifying all men
by them. Let us treat this virtue as we do every other virtue, not fitting
it to a set of rules which everyone knows do not fit the realities, but
taking our courage in our hands and judging human beings (if we must
judge them) by their real sincerity, their real unselfishness, their real
unwillingness to exploit others--the measure of the chastity of their
souls.
V
THE MORAL STANDARD OF THE FUTURE: WHAT SHOULD IT BE?
"Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt
not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh
on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her
already in his heart. It hath been said, Whosoever shall put
away his wife let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I
say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for
the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and
whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.
"Again ye have heard that it has been said by them of old time,
Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shall perform unto the
Lord thine oaths: but I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither
by heaven; for it is God's throne; nor by the earth; for it is
his footstool; neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the
great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou
canst not make one hair white or black. But let your
communications be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more
than these cometh from evil." (Matthew v., 27-28; 31-37.)
I have tried to reach those realities of human nature on which human
morality must be based. I believe that the fundamental things which we
must take into account are, first, the complex nature of human beings,
who having body, soul, and spirit to reckon with cannot neglect any one of
these without insincerity; and, secondly, the solidarity of the human race,
which makes it futile to act as though the "morals" of any one of us could
be his own affair alone.
It is because of this solidarity that marriage has always been regarded as
a matter of public interest, to be recognized by law, celebrated by some
public ceremony, protected by a legal contract. All are concerned in this
matter, for it affects the race itself, through the children that may be
born.