CHASTITY.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and
emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the
primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary
experience transmitted during the social development of our species.
The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced
the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently
justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those
regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain
path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists.
The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection,
and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists
ignores the first and second law of modification, while their
recognition of the third involves a large number of irrelevant and
irrational precepts.
In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the
prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to
those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in
sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals
fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone
their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or
prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In
countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in
outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral
highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys
and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements
apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in
shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under
eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier
pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of
their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly
as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at
thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty
and twenty-five years were the respective minima.
The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never
been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct of sexual
selection seems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages
without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that
instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of
thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the
characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The
overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all
other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of
its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals
as a matter of frivolous fancy.
And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the
importance of its direction. For, while the sexual instinct, per se,
guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection
refers to the composition of the next generation, of which it thus
determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just
as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease
to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the
perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating
influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek
the complement of their own defects. Small women prefer tall men;
fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides;
practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles
admire a rustic Hercules, and vice versa. Exceptional intensity of
mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union,
or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in
a choice of consequences, will sacrifice the interests of individuals
to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever
ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of
life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such
advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the
benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare
of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical
standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth
in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law
when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions.
In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride
who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental
mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.
In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often
voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station,
disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a
passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a
cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud
barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his
humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a
sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of
an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by
magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the
patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been
transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of
continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis)
states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten
different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of
period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both
increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list.
The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every
genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons.
In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship
has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development
rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success
in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That
strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the
chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny
found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest
females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while
precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and
disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of
Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only
is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”
And if marriages are planned in heaven, that heaven manifests its will
in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or
expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured
against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted
that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long
run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love
will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and
the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a
union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.
C.—PERVERSION.
The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they
could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted
in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by
the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the
Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute
abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of
“unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion;
mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also
practiced as an à-priori safeguard against the awakening of the sexual
instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational
leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the
consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces
the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never
wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were
undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism of Buddha Sakiamuni. The
Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior
merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in
marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and
Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a
compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue
should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman;
nevertheless to avoid ...,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit
in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in
aberrations à la Origenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural
vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.
In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind
were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for
yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of
cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the
nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a
small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but
howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with
gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian
parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their
children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In
Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen;
nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy
old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria millions of mutually
reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the
decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the
cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer,
are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the
shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct
were suppressed in the name of morality.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly
the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The
penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case
of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of
helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal
consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural
agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s
laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred
million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical
sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their
parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature
intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism
and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive
generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of
southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has
assumed proportions which partly counteract the evil by the sternest of
Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with
the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee,
instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature
prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know
neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the
victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—
Losing their beauty and their native grace,
with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier
occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of
even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens
of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities
of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal
Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the
British convents as an absolute ne plus ultra of imaginable corruption.
The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of
immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era.
The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications
that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up
the secret of such aberrations:
Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.
(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)
The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in
speculative opinions were for centuries enforced with all the
truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a
Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even
clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with
barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves
of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even
Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early
marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in
thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature
on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every
marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations
of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years
of unavailing regrets.
E.—REFORM.
Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must
promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of
the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic
functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense
its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of
conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel
the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working
deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the
interests of a clerical dogma.
Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious
Incontinence may be counteracted by more abundant opportunities of
diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian
myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the
adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best
preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent.
Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as
that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public
opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of
premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the
recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical
considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social
ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and
starvation.
In a community of Reformants (as the German philosopher Schelling
proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years
should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the
teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of
Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism.
Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that
the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime
against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the
verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.