OUR MORAL STANDARDS
There are at least three moral standards in existence in the English
world. There is first the Christian standard, for which men and women
are equal, which recognizes the sacredness of personality in every
case, and which calls for absolute continence and chastity before
marriage and absolute fidelity after it. This is the standard I am
concerned to understand and defend.
There is, secondly, the legal standard, for which men and women have
not equal rights, but which, in the marriage and divorce laws, accords
to woman an inferior position--which takes no cognizance of immorality
between unmarried persons unless children result and which, in England
as distinguished from Scotland, attaches no penalties to infidelity on
the part of a husband.
And then, thirdly, there is the working moral standard of society. I
cannot describe it because it differs so greatly in different sections
of society. In general it has to be said that it treats lack of
chastity among unmarried men as a very venial offence and punishes the
same offence in women with very severe social penalties; and it may
certainly be said that it has not yet demanded a full recognition by
the law of the equality of the sexes in the matter of moral and married
rights.
Now the question of the relation of our legal standards to the
Christian standard is an exceedingly difficult and yet vitally
important one. The hope of enforcing the Christian standard by law has
tempted many minds. In our own day many try to make the law of the land
enforce the Christian position about divorce. But there are grave
difficulties in connection with this course. The Christian attitude and
spirit cannot be produced by law. The scope of mere law must always be
much more restricted than the scope of the mind of Christ. The
Christian mind is not primarily concerned with penalties and does not
desire to see penalties attached to the failure to reach the Christian
standard in all things. To attach a criminal stigma to all lapses from
the Christian way in morals would be disastrous.
What might be expected from the law of the land is, I think, that it
should recognize the fundamental equality of men and women, and that,
while demanding less, it should at least point towards the Christian
standard (see note at end of chapter).
For the rest, the adjustment of legal enactments to the Christian ideal
must always be a matter for delicate and vigilant handling.
With regard to the working moral standard of society there is just this
to be said, that if the Christian standard be the true one then our aim
must be nothing less than a condition in which public opinion shall in
all things endorse the latter. To-day the social standard is lax when
the Christian one is strict, and cruel when the Christian is generous
and forgiving. In saying this I am of course thinking of the _true_
Christian standard. There is a conventional Christian standard which is
more cruel and unforgiving than society's standard. But it is really
definitely unchristian. Further, society is radically insincere,
forgiving what can be kept secret, condoning on account of moral
skepticism much general laxity, and yet breaking out into a mock moral
indignation before discovered vice.
We are all in great danger in this connection on account of the
mysterious force of the herd instinct. We tend to accept what others
think just because they think it. We live under the power of convention
often without realizing how insincere and hollow convention may be.
Wherefore if we are ever to make progress it becomes nothing less than
a duty to scrutinize current standards. They may be less than
Christian, and if we are ever to make progress it can only come through
an honest process of inquiry and revision.
_The Reasons for the Christian Standard_
To-day the spirit of inquiry and challenge is definitely demanding the
reasons for the Christian standard itself. But I have no complaint to
offer on that account. I believe only good can come from it in the end.
I believe the stored wisdom of the ages is embodied in that Christian
standard, and that the more we know about sex the more clearly do
we perceive that that standard points the way, and the only way, to
real happiness for men and women in social relations, and to the
attainment of our highest life. But I freely acknowledge the right of
the rising generation to demand the reasons for this standard. I
propose, therefore, to try to state those reasons on the assumption
that I am addressing honest and sincere minds who only want to know the
truth. I can only work out the answer bit by bit.
To begin with, "Why is self-abuse wrong?" It comes under the head of
incontinence, which the Bible and all serious moral teachers so firmly
condemn. But why? Doctors are beginning to say that unless it is
excessive it does no particular harm either to the brain or the body.
Its victims worry about it--But need they? Here at least the answer is
easily found because it is supplied by those, and by all of those, who
indulge in the practice. I have never met a man who did not despise
himself for it. It invariably leaves a man out of conceit with himself.
I have heard men stoutly defending irregular relations with women, but
I have never heard this practice defended, even though it is
exceedingly common. Robust male sentiment is all against it. And the
reason is that, because it is an attempt to satisfy sexual craving in
an abnormal way, it always leaves psychic disturbance behind it. It may
relieve a physical tension, but it does nothing to satisfy the whole
man. It leaves a bad taste in the mind. Both mind and spirit as well as
the body enter into true sexual experience. They have no place in this,
and by reason of it the inner harmonies of a man's nature are
inevitably jangled.
I have noticed, too, a further and very serious consequence of this
habit. It plants deep in many men's minds, and especially in the minds
of sensitive and intellectual men, an abhorrence for the sexual side of
themselves. Just because they have never achieved freedom from them,
they hate and despise the passions that overcome them. This often leads
to very serious consequences when love enters into their lives. They
want then to dissociate love from all its physical concomitants. They
regard all things sexual as impure. It may even come to them as a shock
to find out that the women they love are capable of passion, and they
resent any bodily effects of their own love. And this may almost spell
calamity unless psychological adjustment is achieved in time. For true
marriage _must_ involve a clean and happy acceptance of the sexual
facts. A man must bring a clean mind to the whole of his common life
with the woman he loves, and self-abuse is ultimately a serious evil
just because it defiles the mind.
Then, secondly, why are wild oats evil things to sow? Why should we not
endorse the shrug of the shoulders with which society treats them? I
notice that even women lightly forgive them, and I believe they make a
mistake. Forgiveness is indeed always a divine operation, but light
forgiveness implies that nothing serious has happened. What then is so
serious about licentiousness?
I must of necessity discriminate at this point. By wildness men often
mean occasional intimacies into which they do not pretend to be led by
love. About such experiences I suppose men would say that they amount
merely to the satisfaction of a physical appetite, and that after they
are over a man may go his way as little affected as is a man who has
satisfied his thirst.
But that is not the truth about them. The man in such cases suffers
damage. He suffers it because he has attempted an impossibility. He
has tried to separate the various parts of his being, and to satisfy
his animal nature without any consideration for his mind and heart. But
sexual experience itself proves that that cannot be done. The sexual
instinct is intimately related to our whole beings, but especially to
our affections. At the moment of sexual intimacy a man at least
pretends for the moment that he loves, and when he offers that pretence
to someone whom in reality he despises and means to leave in an hour,
he does violence to his whole nature. The soul of him insists all the
time that this is a low business. His outraged mind and heart protest
and produce an evil after-taste. No man likes to remember such events.
The best of him could not enter into them. He is left jangled and
upset. All that makes such doings seem right at any time is that
when it has reached a certain degree of intensity passion seems to
justify its own demands. That is the age-long illusion whereby evil
deceives and betrays us. But till we have learnt to repudiate
that suggestion we are not even on the way to succeed in this part of
life. Often the men who defend such indulgences admit that they are
gross, and then fall back upon the contention that a man _must_ be
gross at times--that his nature demands it. It is a fairly serious
slander to offer to our sex. Fortunately there exist thousands of
incarnate proofs that it is _only_ a slander. We all know that his
sexual nature sets the ordinary healthy man a very serious problem, and
about that I have tried to speak with sympathy and charity in a later
chapter. But the assertion that a man _must_ be gross is hard
to hear with patience. It is one of the lies that savor of cowardice.
By "wildness," however, men sometimes mean temporary intimate relations
between men and women to which they _are_ led by love, and such
relationships are at least very different in moral quality from the
gross ones I have spoken of.
Why must they be condemned? My whole contention is that love and love
alone makes physical intimacy pure and right. Why then cannot love
sanctify passionate relationships outside marriage? Why should the
union of true lovers be held to be impure before marriage and pure
after it?
Let me answer the last query first. I do not think the union of true
lovers apart from marriage is impure. I believe that such lovers make a
very serious mistake--a mistake that may turn out to have been cruel. I
believe that society is utterly right in condemning such unions, and
that those who really understand will always refuse to enter on them.
But impure is not the word to apply to them. They are clean and
beautiful compared to the bodily intimacies of those who marry without
love. And yet I do not think that even emotionally they can ever be
perfect. Sexual intimacy is not the perfect and sacramental thing which
it is meant to be unless both parties come to it with free and
untroubled minds, feeling that what they do is a right and happy thing.
But in the unions of unmarried persons there generally lurks some
half-hidden sense of shame. Some part of the being of one or the other
really endorses society's standards, and even love cannot dispel the
shadows thus created.
And yet still that does not meet the challenge to show the _reason_ for
society's standard. The reasons are really many. In the first place, if
unmarried lovers take steps to prevent their intimacy from having its
due fruit in a child, they are robbing their experience of its fine
spontaneity, and introducing an element of calculation and caution into
what should be a thing unbound. While, on the other hand, if they do
not prevent the coming of a child they are, in the present state of
society, doing a definite and cruel wrong to their own offspring. To
love a child dearly and to know that by your own act you have
handicapped it in life from the first must be a bitter experience
indeed. I am well aware that law in regard to illegitimate children is
unchristian. Even more is the attitude of society to them unchristian.
But so long as things remain as they are, the parents of an
illegitimate child do it a wrong. Further, even though law and custom
should alter, it would still be true that a child without both its own
parents is seriously handicapped in life. Which leads on to my next
point; for, secondly, if two lovers really love, they want to give
their whole selves to one another, including their whole futures. No
man truly and loyally loves a woman who wants to keep open a loophole
of escape from her. It would be well if women would always apply this
test to the passionate protestations of men. Real love is love
without reserve. True sexual intimacy in itself means taking each other
for better or for worse, and when lovers unite themselves though still
unwilling for such permanent unions, their love is not perfect. They
are not really united by love. They are letting mere present desire
carry them away. I hear of many men, and even of some women, who ask
why they should not have many lovers if they have many friends. The
answer is that no man gives his whole self to a friend, but that love,
when it is real, does mean the giving of your whole self. And that,
plainly, a man can only do to one woman and a woman to one man.
It is generally in defense of temporary unions that people question the
necessity for marriage vows. But temporary unions cannot be ended
happily. If they were entered on without love, they are gross things,
as I have already said; and if they were the creation of real love,
there is no happy way out of them. The two have been too close to one
another to part without tearing apart--leaving ragged and it may be
bleeding edges on their personalities. Then again, as I have tried to
show already, love is only made perfect when it is allowed to issue in
responsibilities and labors. Divorced from them it is a selfish thing.
There is a wild and lawless element in passion, which is part of its
glory. But that glory is only sweetened and justified for those who let
their passion carry them through the whole career of experience to
which it summons them.
All this may be accepted as establishing a case for permanent unions as
the only legitimate things, but inasmuch as it claims that the demand
for permanence lies in the very heart of love itself it may still be
asked with some urgency, "Why introduce a marriage ceremony with public
vows?" And here I must follow a somewhat different line of thought
which may at first sight seem contradictory. In spite of all that I
have said, I believe that even ardent lovers are all the better for
being bound, because of the wayward element of inconstancy in human
nature. Thousands of married persons have never once been conscious of
their vows. They have never come near thinking, "We must hold together
because we promised," or "We must make the best of things because we
are tied together." Thousands have never for a moment wanted to change
their condition. But with others it is not so. No men or women are
always at their best. Though they may have had moments on the heights
when they gladly took each other for better or for worse, there will
come other moods when the finer notes of love will not sound in their
ears. There will come to all but a few couples hours when they will be
irritated and annoyed with one another. And if they were free to do so,
they might fling away from each other and so miss after all the best
that was to be. For the best is not to be found in those early days
when passion flames and dominates, but rather in those later days when
two personalities have at last become really fitted to each other and
when the daily round of labor is illumined by the lamp of love. And
therefore, being what we are, it is a good thing for our own sakes that
we should be bound.
Even though the bonds should actually mean pain, it is still good that
they should be allowed to bind, though it be only for the sake of the
children. Passionate lovers do not think of children, but society must
needs put their claims before all others. Probably the historical
reason why society came to insist on monogamy and to condemn all
irregular unions lay in the fact that it is the inalienable right of a
child to be brought up by a father and a mother, and that no society
can be strong and finely ordered unless its foundations are laid in
family life, wherein men and women co-operate to give the rising
generation every possible chance.
I assume that I am addressing honest minds that wish to handle the
issues of life sincerely and wisely, and to them I am sure it must be
worth pointing out that it can never be right for individuals to order
their lives on principles which could not be given a universal
application. I can well understand a passionate couple being quite
sure that they will hold to one another throughout life, though they be
in no way legally tied. I can imagine that many such couples would
resent as a profanity the mere suggestion that they could ever want to
part. But imagine what society would become if legal ties were
abolished. You and your man or woman may be quite sure that you would
never part, but you know that thousands would. Couples would set out on
the joint life with little thought, and allow the first painful
misunderstanding to part them. Many men would shake off their
obligations almost as soon as they found they were becoming heavy. Both
men and women would pass from one temporary union to another,
mutilating their better natures in the process. Thousands of women
would be left in helpless loneliness. Tens of thousands of children
would go uncared for and neglected. The picture becomes more horrible
the more carefully you look into its details. And as you look you begin
to see the real value of our moral standard. It is not an instance of
the fussiness of Mrs. Grundy. It is not an instance of slave morality
imposed upon free people. It is not one of the arbitrary dicta of a
tyrannical Church. It is rather the embodiment of the wisdom learnt
through ages of varied and often tragic experience. It is an attempt to
conserve for each rising generation the possibility of the best in the
field of sexual experience. It does point out the way of happy,
healthy, and complete life.
I have left to the end a thought about the marriage ceremony which will
only appeal to some, but which I feel ought to have a place in this
chapter. Many fine and sensitive lovers shrink from the publicity of
ordinary weddings. Their love is to them so sacred and so personal a
thing that they do not want to make any parade of themselves before a
great gathering of relations and friends. Well! I know of no binding
reason why such sensitive couples should call in the relations
and friends. Those relations and friends like to rejoice with those who
rejoice, because of a very human and kindly interest. And many couples,
and especially many brides, greatly enjoy their friends on their
marriage day. If, however, a couple prefer a private wedding that is
their affair. But about the place and value of a religious ceremony
I do want to add a word. If a man and a woman realize that their love
is a sacred thing, I believe they will find they actually want to make
the great step into final intimacy in the presence of God, and to stop
for a moment ere they go up into that mysterious country to ask His
blessing and guidance. I have said that at a certain point love itself
demands intimacy, and that it is an entirely natural thing for us to
desire it. But none the less it _is_ a momentous hour in the life of
any couple when they pass behind the last barriers and enter on a
sacramental oneness of body. It is a wonderful hour--the hour of all
others when the romance of life is most splendid. But just because
it is that, and because the issues of that hour are so far-reaching,
what could be more seemly than that they should pause for a moment on
the threshold and ask the Giver of all love to bless and guide them!
To kneel first together before Him, and then to pass on--to acknowledge
His goodness as the author of love, and then to go up on to love's high
places, what could be more just to the real facts! I know not with what
solemnities those who do _not_ believe in God are going to dignify that
hour in life, but to all young men and women who _do_ believe in God, I
would like to say with all possible urgency: Be sure you do not take
that great step until you can ask God's blessing on the taking of it.
Be sure you pause a while to be quiet before Him ere you allow your
love to have its final sway over you.
NOTE.--It will be said at once at this point by some, "That means the
law is wrong in allowing the remarriage of divorced persons, because in
that case there is a definite contradiction between the legal and the
Christian standards."
I have deliberately excluded a discussion of the problem of divorce
from this book because I am concerned with the unalterable truths about
sex rather than with the social question of how best unhappy situations
arising from sin can be remedied.
But at this point I must say a word. I conceive the Christian position
to be "Marriage cannot be broken without sin." And that position the
law endorses. It requires proof that in fact a marriage has been broken
by sin, before it will sever the legal bonds.
I cannot, however, believe it to be a Christian interest to maintain
the mock appearance of a marriage when (if ever) all moral content has
disappeared from it. Christianity calls for an unlimited forgiveness.
But when forgiveness and patience have failed and either husband or
wife has found another connection or has even ceased to have any vital
relation to his or her partner in marriage, then I feel that that
marriage is morally dead. And dead things should be buried if possible.
There remains the question of remarriage.
If the law allows this and if Christianity says "There is a higher way
to which God calls you," I do not think there is here an indefensible
contradiction. It is a case of a higher and a lower way.
The law says "I will not compel you to remain unmarried." Christianity
says "I will not compel you at all, but I call you in love's name."
That is exactly the situation we must accept in connection with many of
Christ's precepts. Giving alms. Loving enemies. Refusing to judge.
Refusing to swear, etc., etc. These are all clear Christian duties. But
law cannot deal with them. All this seems to me quite plain. In common
honesty, however, I must confess that it is not clear to me that the
spirit of Christ does forbid the remarriage of a divorced person in all
cases. Christian marriage always has love in it. It is not always there
in actual marriage. We must think the whole matter out afresh in terms
of love before we can understand the Christian way. Some things the
world calls marriages are not really marriages at all to the Christian
mind.