SEX KNOWLEDGE IS COMPATIBLE WITH PERFECT REFINEMENT AND INNOCENCE.
The reader who has followed me through the preceding chapters will, I
hope, feel that, whatever objections there may be to giving explicit
instruction on sex matters to the young, such instruction is immensely
to be preferred to the almost inevitable perversion which follows
ignorance. If we had to choose between a state of "innocence" and a
state of reverent knowledge, many people would doubtless incline to
the former. No such option exists. Our choice lies between leaving a
lad to pick up information from vulgar and unclean minds, and giving
it ourselves in such a manner as to invest it from the first with
sacredness and dignity.
Even if the reader is still inclined to think that sex-knowledge is,
at best, an unholy secret, he will hardly doubt that it can be
divulged with less injury by an adult who is earnestly anxious for the
child's welfare than by coarse and irreverent lips.
I am not content to leave the reader in this dilemma. I am confident
that the following words of Canon Lyttelton spring from the truest
spiritual insight: "To a lover of nature, no less than to a convinced
Christian, the subject ought to wear an aspect not only negatively
innocent, but positively beautiful. It is a recurrent miracle, and yet
the very type and embodiment of law; and it may be confidently
affirmed that, in spite of the blundering of many generations, there
is nothing in a normally-constituted child's mind which refuses to
take in the subject from this point of view, provided that the right
presentation of it is the first."
Nothing more forcibly convicts the present system of the evil which
lies at its door than the current beliefs on this subject. At present,
sexual knowledge is picked up from the gutter and the cesspool; and no
purification can free it entirely in many minds from its original
uncleanness.
"Love's a virtue for heroes!--as white as the snow on high hills,
And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures,
and fulfils."
This is the prophet's belief, and yet, putting on one side those who
actually delight in uncleanness, there appear to be many people who
look upon the marriage certificate as a licence to impurity, and upon
sexual union as a form of animal indulgence to which we are so
strongly impelled that even the most refined are tempted by it into an
act of conscious indelicacy and sin. Such people read literally the
psalmist's words: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my
mother conceive me." It is surely some such feeling as this which
makes parents shrink from referring to the subject, which underlies
the constant use of the word "innocence" as the aptest description of
a state of mind which precedes the acquisition of sexual knowledge.
That individuals, at least, have risen to a loftier conception than
this is certain; and the only possible explanations of the prevalence
of the current idea are that sex-knowledge has almost always been
obtained from a tainted source; and that, while the coarse have not
merely whispered their views in the ear in the closet, but have, in
all ages, proclaimed them from the house-tops, the refined have hardly
whispered their ideas, much less discussed them publicly. Children
growing up with perverted views have listened to the loud assertions
of disputants on the one side, have witnessed the demoralisation which
so often attends the sexual passion, but have received no hint of what
may be said on the other side of the question.
An instructed public opinion would be horrified at our sovereign's
taking shares in a slave-trading expedition as Queen Elizabeth did. We
are aghast at the days when crowds went forth to enjoy the torture at
the stake of those from whom they differed merely on some metaphysical
point. We have even begun to be restless under man's cruel domination
over the animal creation. But we have made far less advance in our
conceptions on sexual matters; and we are content here with ideas
which were current in Elizabethan days. But for this, no passion for
conservatism, no reverence for a liturgy endeared by centuries of use,
could induce us to tell every bride as she stands before God's altar
that it is one of her functions to provide an outlet for her
husband's passion and a safeguard against fornication. Lust is at
least as degrading in married life as it is outside it. No legal
contract, no religious ceremony, can purify, much less sanctify, what
is essentially impure.
Those who desire to assist in the uplifting of humanity cannot afford
to be silent and to allow judgment to go against them by default.
Courage they will need; for a charge of indecency is sure to be
levelled against them by the indecent, and they may be misjudged even
by the pure.
This is not the place in which so delicate a matter can be fully
discussed, nor does space permit; but if the movement towards sex
instruction is not to be stultified by the very ideas which evidence
the need for it, the subject cannot be wholly ignored here, and I
venture to throw out a few suggestions.
Are we indeed to believe that the noblest and most spiritual of men
will compromise themselves in the eyes of the woman they love best,
and whose respect they most desire, by committing in her presence and
making her the instrument of an indelicate act? A great poet, who
remained an ardent lover and a devoted companion until his wife died
in his arms--blissfully happy that she might die so--has written:
"Let us not always say,
'Spite of the flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.'
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, 'All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.'"
Again: are we, who believe in a Divine government of the world, able
to imagine that God has made the perpetuation of the race dependent
upon acts of sin or of indelicacy? Did He who graced with His presence
the marriage at Cana in Galilee really countenance a ceremony which
was a prelude to sin? Did He who took the little children in His arms
and blessed them know, as He said "for of such is the kingdom of
heaven," that not one of them could have existed without indelicacy,
and that they were but living proof of their fathers' lapses and their
mothers' humiliation? Is He whom we address daily as "Our Father"
willing to be described by a name with which impurity is of necessity
connected? And has He implanted in us as the strongest of our
instincts that which cannot elevate and must debase?
Again: it needs no wide experience of life, nor any very indulgent
view of it, to feel some truth at least in the words Tennyson puts
into the mouth of his ideal man:
"Indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid
Not only to keep down _the base in man_,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire for fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man."
And yet this passion is indisputably sexual passion, and the chastest
of lovers has bodily proof that the most spiritual of his kisses is
allied to the supreme embrace of love. Our body is the instrument by
which all our emotions are expressed. The most obvious way of
expressing affection is by bodily contact. The mother fondles her
child, kisses its lips and its limbs, and presses it to her breast.
Young children hold hands, put their arms round one another and kiss;
and, although later we become less demonstrative, we still take our
friend's arm, press his hand with ours, and lay a hand upon his
shoulder; we pat our horse or dog and stroke our cat. The lover
returns to the spontaneous and unrestrained caresses of his childhood.
These become more and more intimate until they find their consummation
in the most intimate and most sacred of all embraces. From first to
last these caresses--however deep the pleasure they bestow--are sought
by the mother or the lover, not _for the sake of_ that pleasure, but
as a means of expressing emotion. He only who realises this fact and
conforms to it can enter on married life with any certainty of
happiness. The happiness of very many marriages is irretrievably
shattered at the outset through the craving for sexual excitement
which, in the absence of wise guidance, grows up in every normal boy's
heart, and by the contemplation of sexual intercourse as an act of
physical pleasure.
And once again: It is the experience of those who have given
instruction in sex questions to the young that by those whose minds
have never been defiled the instruction is received with instant
reverence, as something sacred; not with shame, as something foul. I
venture once more to quote Canon Lyttelton, who sets forth his
experience and my own in language the beauty of which I cannot
imitate:
"There is something awe-inspiring in the innocent readiness of little
children to learn the explanation of by far the greatest fact within
the horizon of their minds. The way they receive it, with native
reverence, truthfulness of understanding, and guileless delicacy, is
nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing bounty of Nature,
who endows successive generations of children with this instinctive
ear for the deep harmonies of her laws. People sometimes speak of the
indescribable beauty of children's innocence, and insist that there is
nothing which calls for more constant thanksgiving than that influence
on mankind. But I will venture to say that no one quite knows what it
is who has foregone the privilege of being the first to set before
them the true meaning of life and birth and the mystery of their own
being."
To the arguments thus briefly indicated it is no answer to say that
sexual union is essentially physical, and that to regard it in any
other way is transcendental. Among primitive men eating and drinking
were merely animal. We have made them, in our meals, an accompaniment
to social pleasures, and in our religious life we have raised them to
a sacramental level.