more deplorable in a woman, a thing to be ashamed of, a thing to crush down
and suppress, a thing you would not confess to your nearest friends, or
discuss with your physician. To speak of it even to your own mother would
be to be met with the averted look and word of disapproval. If, as a
consequence of this, women have inhibited their own nature, so that
many women have created in their minds a kind of tone-deafness, a
colour-blindness to this side of life, does that not seem to you a tragedy?
To have so great and wonderful a thing in your nature and to suppress it as
though it were something shameful and weak? Do you wonder if the term
"old maid" has become synonym for everything that is narrow, and hard, and
prudish and repressive? Do you wonder that the girls of this generation,
confronted with the choice between such an attitude towards life as that,
and its opposite - willingness to give oneself to anyone, to take all that
one can get, because life refuses so much that one had hoped for - do you
wonder that they often choose the second alternative? Does it seem to you
so astonishing that girls, who think more than they used to, who feel that
there is nothing to be ashamed of in the divine impulse of their creative
womanhood, should rather take what they can get than accept that cruel,
cramped attitude of sheer repression which has been all too often their
only choice in the past? Is it really fair to say to them that their
moral standards are going down, that they have no sense now of morality
or self-respect? I tell you that if one has to make a choice between the
suppression of one half - and that so beautiful a half - of human nature, and
its degradation, I would not sit in judgment on those who chose either way.
But there is another possibility. You can repress, and God knows how many
boys and young men, how many young women and girls have struggled to do so,
and are trying to do so to-day, with a sense always of guilt and shame
in their minds, laying up mental difficulties for themselves, the
psychologists tell us, by this repression. You know the type; you know the
kind of person who becomes hard and narrow and uncomprehending. That is
one type. You can read it in their faces. The pinched look, the cramped
mentality reflects itself in the body and in the face. And then there is
the other type, those who have rejected this attitude towards life, denying
that there is anything to be ashamed of in the natural impulse of their
sex, or cause for regret if they give rein to that whose repression does
so much harm, who frankly fling away the idea of self-control, because
repression has seemed such a disastrous method of self-control. You can see
it in their faces also; in the gradual demoralization of their nature.
The rake on one hand, the prude on the other, represent the ultimate
consequence of the process I am trying to describe. Many people have marked
on their souls, if not on their faces, one or other of these ways of life.
They have not, perhaps, gone far, they may have gone but a little way in
one direction or the other; but the mark on the soul remains all the same.
And when you see the extreme result, the prude on one side, the rake on
the other, do you not begin to desire a better way? To ask yourself whether
there is not a third choice before you?
I believe there is; and the choice is this: It is neither the repression
nor the degradation, but _transformation_ of the sex side of our nature.
I will take as the supreme example of that transformation the figure of
Christ Himself - Christ who had neither wife nor child - St. Francis of
Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Theresa of Spain. Four of the greatest
figures - One of them supreme - who were not "natural celibates" in the sense
that implies that they did not have surging through them the divine impulse
of creative love; for these are the greatest lovers the world has ever
seen, and compared with theirs even the great love of one man for one
woman, one woman for one man, is the lesser thing. But these great figures
in human history are those on whose hearts Humanity itself made such a
claim that it became impossible for them to give to one what was claimed by
all the world. You will see that this is not a denial of creative love, for
no one in the world has so loved the world as these. They are the beacons
of humanity in this matter of love, and how are they, shall we say, how
are they not fathers and mothers, whose spiritual children are all over the
world? Have they not born into the world with travail of soul, the souls of
men and women? These great Lovers of Humanity were not lacking in passion;
had they been they could not have moved the world; but their passion was
transmuted to the service of Humanity itself, for nothing else was great
or wide enough for such a love. Does anyone suppose that it was a mere
instinct of asceticism that drove St. Francis to make out of snow, cold
images of wife and child? Was it not rather the sudden resurgent desire of
the greatest of the saints for some more humanly warm affection, something
more individual, something that nestles more closely to the heart, than
this great service of Humanity? And in a savage irony he mocks his pain.
"There are thy children, there is thy wife," says St. Francis, and his cry
is not the answer of the spirit to a lustful temptation: it was the cry of
a lonely human heart for the human happiness of wife and children and home.
Aye, and I would claim that Our Lord Himself had this desire. For I cannot
doubt that in that glorious young manhood of His, so full of power and
sympathy and love, this agony of longing sometimes swept over Him. He whose
vitality and power were such that He hardly knew fatigue, who was so close
a friend, so much loved and sought by women, so tender to little children,
so young, so strong - is it not certain that He was indeed "tempted in all
things like as we are"? How could one so physically vital, so humanly and
divinely full of love, escape the conflict? That He conquered we know; that
He suffered we cannot doubt. All His perfect humanity speaks to us in that
lonely cry: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but
the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." Do not dream, those of you
who may have to struggle with your own nature, do not dream that Christ
has not been there with you, that He had nothing to feel or to suffer. How
would He have developed that spiritual power, how would He have become so
great a Lover of the world if He knew nothing of that side of life? But He,
and His greatest followers - St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine and St.
Theresa, and countless others who have followed them - learned to transmute
that great creative force, disdained both choices which I set before you,
finding a nobler and more glorious way. These would neither repress this
great impulse, nor dissipate it, but so used it for the service of man that
there is in all the history of man no life more rich, more human, more full
of love, more full of creation, or more full of power, than the lives of
these celibate men and women, who learned from Christ how they could live
and love.
It is not easy for men and women this way, but it is possible. It is
possible, and it is glorious; and, in its degree, the need for it comes to
everyone. Do not imagine that it is not needed in marriage as well as
out of marriage. Every married lover will tell you that if his love is to
remain what it was in the beginning - if it is rather to grow in power and
beauty - he also must be able gradually to transmute his love in such a way
that the spirit dominates the flesh more and more, and that the physical
side of marriage becomes simply an expression of the love of the spirit,
the perfect final expression, the sacrament of love. Do not imagine that
this is not needed, this effort, and this power, by every human being who
desires to be human in his love, and not something less than human. And to
those to whom the need comes in its sternest form, I will not pretend for
a moment that it is not hard. Nay, I will prophesy to you that if you do so
choose to serve the world, it will to all of you sometimes seem too hard.
With Christ, with St. Francis, your human nature will sometimes assert
itself. "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the
Son of Man" - the Servant of Humanity - has no such joy. But of whatever life
you choose, that is sometimes true. To the finest spirit in marriage there
comes sometimes the thought that, but for this great claim, he might have
undertaken some adventure, might have answered some call, which now he
cannot answer. Does that mean that he regrets his choice? No, not for
a moment! It only means that human nature is so rich and so varied that
whatever life you forego will sometimes seem to you the better choice. You
will think, for a moment, that you might have chosen differently. If that
happened to St. Francis, believe me, it will happen to you. But yet, is it
not a heroic path that I point out to you? Is it not possible that to this
generation heroism may be possible in such a way, on such a scale, that you
will leave this world nobler in moral stature because of the hardness
which you endured, the choice that you made? Women, to whom this comes home
specially at this time, may it not be that you, by taking this way, will
become the mothers in spirit of women in a happier generation, on whom will
never again be imposed our cramped, stifling, sub-human conception of what
women ought to be? You will show to the world not only that the individual
woman of genius may have a value to Humanity beyond her sex, but that every
woman has that value. In solving your own problem, and taking hold of life
where most it hurts you, you will end by making a moral standard nobler, a
humanity richer and more human, a womanhood freer, greater, more Christlike
than it was. And future generations shall rise up and call you blessed.
III
CONSIDERATION OF OTHER SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE DISPROPORTION OF THE
SEXES
"My spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given."
Shelley: "Adonais."
Let us now move away from that aspect of the moral problem which
has concerned us hitherto - that of the difficulties created by the
disproportion of the sexes at this time and in this country - and consider
the problem as it presents itself under more normal conditions. For even
in ages and in countries where there are an equal number of men and women
there are difficulties in their relations with one another, and a "moral
problem."
People ask, for example, whether sex-relationships should be governed by
law at all; whether they should continue in any given case when passion has
died, or when love (which is more than passion) has gone. Should love ever
be other than perfectly free, and is not the attempt to bind it essentially
"immoral"? Should it ever be exclusive or proprietary? Is not the "moral
problem" really created, not by human nature, but by the attempt to bind
what cannot be bound and to coerce what should be free?
The answer given to such questions is often to-day on the side of what is
called, mistakenly, I think, "free love." And in considering this answer,
I want to remind you that it is often given by people who are most sincere,
most idealistic, in their own lives and in their own love. Indeed it has
often been pointed out that it is at times of great spiritual exaltation
and fervour that the cult of "free love" is most likely to find adherents.
The great principle that "love is the fulfilling of the law" is held with
a fervour which makes any question as to what love is, and how much it
involves, seem half-hearted and cold. Those who preach this doctrine remind
us - and very justly - of the weakness and insincerity of the "orthodox"
moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom. They revolt
against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a
woman "a hold over her husband" when he has "grown tired of her," or as
justifying a man in enforcing upon his wife the rights which only love
makes right, when she has grown tired of him. I appeal, therefore, to those
to whom the dispassionate discussion of "free love" seems quite outrageous,
to remember that there are those to whom this teaching is _not_ a mere
excuse for licence, but an attempt to reach something lovelier and nobler
than the present moral code, whose failures and insincerities no thinking
person can ignore.
In considering this view, I want first to point out that although to have
no legal or enforceable tie in sex-relationships seems on the surface much
the simplest and easiest way to arrange life, although permanent monogamous
marriage is exceedingly difficult and inconvenient, yet the movement of
humanity does seem to have been on the whole in that direction. It is, of
course, untrue to say that among primitive peoples there is anything that
can fairly be called promiscuity. Historians and anthropologists have
taught us that among all peoples, however barbarous, there are conventions,
sanctions, tabus, by which the relations of men and women are regulated.
The customs of such people may seem to us mere licence; but they are not
so. And some of the customs of more "civilized" countries are at least as
horrifying to the "savage" as his can be to us. Nevertheless, it is true
to say that as civilization advances, and especially where the position of
women improves, the movement has been towards a more stable and exclusive
form of marriage. We grope uncertainly towards it: we fail atrociously. Yet
we do not abandon an ideal which asks so much of human nature that human
nature is continually invoked to prove its impossibility.
Why have we persisted? It is idle to speak of monogamy as though it were
a senseless rule imposed on unfortunate humanity by some all-powerful
Superman. We have imposed it on ourselves. It is our doing. Why have we
done it? Surely because, in spite of its alleged "impossibility," its
obvious inconveniences, there is some need in human nature which demands a
permanent and a stable sex relationship to meet it.
I believe that there is something in our human nature which desires
stability in its relations with other human beings. It is perhaps a
recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its
conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to
time. Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent!
There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human
personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms. It is not only in sexual
relations that this is true. It is true of all human intercourse. The
longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a
physical only, but a spiritual necessity: and it is bound up with the
greater faithfulness of human lovers. In parenthood, in loverhood, in
friendship, those who take their obligations lightly are not the finer
sort of men and women, but the slighter, cheaper make. It is not a love of
freedom but a certain inferiority and shoddiness that makes it possible
for us to give ourselves, and take others, lightly. For in all human
relationships it is "ourselves" that we give and take. It is not what your
friend does for you or gives to you that makes him your friend; but what
he _is_ to you. It is his personality that you have shared. And so there
is something rather repulsive in quickly forgetting or throwing it away.
People who make friends and lose them as the trees put out their leaves
in spring to shed them in the autumn, are not quite human. The capacity to
make friends - to make many friends - is a great power: the capacity to lose
them not so admirable. Yet there are people who always have a bosom-friend,
every time you meet them; only it is never the same friend. And this is a
poor sort of friendship, for it _is_ poor to give and take so little that
you easily cease or forget to give at all.
If this is true of friends, it is not less true of lovers: it is more
true. For sex-love includes more of one's personality, it more completely
involves body, soul and spirit, is the most perfect form of union that
human beings know. How strange, then, to argue that one may treat a lover
as one would not treat a friend! Make one and lose one so lightly, and
disavow all the responsibility of a love in which so much is given, so much
involved! It is true that all human love has a physical element, even if
it is only the desire for the physical presence of the beloved one. We
all want sometimes to see and to touch our friends. But in sex-love that
physical element becomes a desire for perfect union, expressing a spiritual
harmony. Can one take such a gift lightly, and pass from one relationship
to another with a readiness which would seem contemptible in a friend?
It is this holding of human personality cheap that is really immoral,
really dishonest: for it is not cheap. It is this which makes prostitution
a horror, and prostitutes the Ishmaels of their race. They "sell cheap what
is most dear," and, knowing this, rage against their buyers. The hideously
demoralizing effect of a life of prostitution on the soul is a commonplace.
"These women," it has been said, "sink so low that they cease to know what
love is, they cease to be able to give. They can only cheat and steal and
sell." It is true. Whatever virtues of kindliness and pity the prostitute
may (and often does) have for other unfortunates and outcasts, her attitude
in general does become that of the parasite, the swindler, the vampire.
Why? Because on her the deepest outrage against human personality is
committed. Without a shadow of claim, without a pretence of offering its
equivalent, that, in her, is bought and sold which is beyond price. Why
should she not cheat and thieve? Take all she can, she cannot get the true
value of what has been bought from her. Does she reason all that out? More
often than we think. But whether she reasons consciously or not, she knows
she has been defrauded: and she defrauds.
But it is the buying and selling, I shall be told, that makes her so vile:
between such a sale and the free gift of lovers lies the whole difference
between morality and immorality. I do not think so. It is the contemptuous
use of another which is immoral, and though actually to buy and sell the
person is the lowest depth of immorality, because it is the lowest and
most brutal expression of such contempt, any lightness or irreverence
is "immoral" in its degree; so therefore is conduct which makes love an
evanescent thing, or the giving of personality which love involves, a
passing emotion.
If we feel this to be so in friendship, surely it is more and not less
true of a union so complete on every plane as that of sex. Can you take
that - and give it - and pass on, as though it were a light thing?
The desire for permanence, for stability, for trustworthiness lies very
deep in human nature. We may - we do - rebel against it, and speak with
rapture of an unfettered existence without material ties: but even in
material things the nomad is the least creative, the least civilized of his
kind. His existence is neither so picturesque nor so human as we imagine.
One has only to read history to see how little he has contributed to
humanity - and how little he has helped to raise the human level above the
animal. It is not for nothing that we find the home imposed upon human kind
by the necessities of human infancy. It is the helplessness of the child
that has humanized our species by creating the home which its helplessness
demanded, and though a great deal that is sentimental is said about homes,
this remains a fact. The nomadic, the homeless race gives little to the
world; it is by nature and circumstances an exploiter of resources for
which it feels no responsibility, from which it is content to take without
giving. Reading in a pamphlet of Professor Toynbee's the other day, I found
this description of the Eastern world in the 15th and 16th centuries of our
era: - "Even when the East began to recover and comparatively stable Moslem
states arose again in Turkey and Persia and Hindustan, _the nomadic taint
was in them and condemned them to sterility_.... One gets the impression
not of a government administering a country, but of _a horde of nomads
exploiting it_."[B]
[Footnote B: The italics are mine. - A.M.R.]
Even so is it with human love. These nomads of the affections give and take
so little as they pass from hand to hand that they become cheap and have
little left to give at last: nor do they really get what they would take.
Men and women claim the right to "experience," but experience of what? We
do not live by bread alone, and the physical experience is not really
all we seek. It is something, however? Yes - certainly something: but by
a paradox familiar enough in human affairs, to snatch the lesser is to
sacrifice the greater. The experimental lover, the giver whose small and
careful gift is for a time, claims in the name of "experience," of the
"fulfilment of his nature," what really belongs only to a greater giving.
Such lovers are like a rich man who sets out tramping with nothing in his
pocket. He may suffer temporary inconvenience, but is within safe distance
of his banking account. He plays with a risk he can never really know,
since knowledge and experience are not for those "whose sails were never
to the tempest given." The prudent lover whose love is lightly given for
as long as it lasts is as wise - and as futile.
I think, too, that those who offer this little price for so great a thing
have nothing left at last. To taste love, to _use_ the great passion of sex
is on a par with the exploitation of genius on a series of "pot-boilers."
Genius may outlast a few such meannesses, but they will murder it at last,
and the man who by pot-boiling has gained the opportunity to create a real
work of art finds there is no more art left in him. He has now the leisure,
the opportunity, the public: but not the power. So is it with those who
lightly use so great a thing as sex. Yielded to every impulse, given
to each "new-hatched, unfledged companion," it loses its capacity for
greatness, and the experience desired passes for ever from the grasp.
It is this which, to my mind, rules out the "experimental marriage."
Much may be said for it - and has been, and is being said by people whose
judgment must command respect. But love is impatient of lending. If it
is not given outright in the belief that the gift is final, can the
"experiment" be valid? Is not this very sense of finality - this desire
to give and burn one's ships - of the very essence of love? One cannot
experiment in finality.
It is true that many marriages would not have taken place, and had much
better not have taken place, if there had been greater knowledge: but we
have yet to learn what greater knowledge can do even without experiment.
Hitherto we have gone to the opposite extreme and buried all that belongs
to sex not in a fog of ignorance only, but under a mountain of hypocrisy
and lies. Let in the light, and see if we cannot do better! And though it
is true that some things cannot be known by any amount of teaching,
and wait upon experience, yet I submit that the essential experience
is realized only when it is believed to be the expression of an undying
love - a gift and not a loan.
Let me say one last word on the solution to our moral difficulties proposed
by those who affirm for every woman "the right to motherhood." This
claim is based on the belief that the creative impulse is more, or more
consciously, present in the sexual nature of a woman than of a man, and
that, in consequence, the satisfaction of that impulse is to a great extent
the satisfaction of a need which makes the disproportionate number of women
in any country a real tragedy. It is impossible to generalize with any
degree of confidence about the sexual nature of either man or woman in our
present state of crude and barbarous ignorance; but I am inclined - very
tentatively - to agree that this generalization is correct, and that the
creative impulse is an even stronger factor in the sexual life of women
than of men. I realize the cruelty of a civilization in which war and
its accessories create an artificial excess of women over men, and in
consequence deprive hundreds of thousands of women of motherhood. I do not
think I underestimate that cruelty or its tragic consequences. I admit the
"right" of women to the exercise of their vocation and the fulfilment of
their nature.
But I affirm that those who base upon this claim the right to bring
children into the world, where society has made marriage impossible, are
not moved to do so by the instinct of motherhood. No, no, for motherhood is
more than a physical act; it is a spiritual power. Its first thought is
not for the right of the mother but of the child. And what are a child's
rights? A home - two parents - all that makes complete the spiritual as well
as the material meaning of "home." I do not believe that there is any
woman who is the mother of young children, and a widow, who does not
daily realize how irreparable is the loss sustained by the fatherless. War
perhaps has inflicted that loss upon them; it is one of the iniquities of
war. And though the mother tries all she can - yes, and works miracles of
love to make herself all she _can_ be to her child, that loss cannot wholly
be made up. I speak with intensity of conviction on this point, for I have
myself a little adopted child - orphaned of both parents - in my home. I
never see other children with their parents without realizing what she has
lost not only in her mother but her father. There is needed the different
point of view, the different relationship, bringing with it a fuller and a
richer experience of life. What woman that hast lost her husband does not
realize the truth of what I say?
It is beside the mark to say that a bad father is worse than no father, or
that accident may take the father even from happily circumstanced homes.
This is true. But a woman does not deliberately _choose_ a bad father for
her children, or _choose_ that he shall be taken away from them by death.
It is the deliberate infliction beforehand of this great loss upon a child
that seems to me the very negation of that motherhood in whose name this
"right" is enforced. And for what purpose is a child to be brought into the
world under conditions so imperfect? To "fulfil the nature" of its mother;
to complete her experience; to meet her need. Is there any mockery of
motherhood more complete than this sacrifice of the child to the mother?
Why, our physical nature itself is less selfish! When a woman conceives,
her child receives _first_ all the nourishment it needs; whatever it does
not demand, the mother has. A woman herself undernourished can, if the
process has not gone too far, bear a well-nourished and a healthy child,
because she has given all to that child. It is the epitome of motherhood!
And now it is affirmed that a woman, to satisfy her own need, has a right
to bring into the world a child on whom she - its mother - has deliberately
inflicted a grave disadvantage. I do not speak of such lesser disadvantages
as may be involved in illegitimacy. I trust the time is at hand when
we shall cease to brand any child as "illegitimate" or despise one for
another's defect. But though children are never illegitimate, parents may
be so; and none more than the woman who sacrifices her child to herself.
For this disadvantage is not a mere cruelty of society which may be
"civilized" away; it is inherent in the case. A child should have a father
and a mother and a home.
It is no defence to say that the unmarried mother proposes to give her
child a better home than many a child of married parents has. If her
concern is for the child, there are, alas! only too many waifs already in
the world to whom such a home, though imperfect, would be a paradise to
what it has. Real motherhood could and often does rescue such children with
joy. That so few children are adopted in a world of women clamouring for
motherhood proves the essential selfishness of the claim. It is not the
child - it is herself - that the woman who demands motherhood as a "right" is
concerned with. What an irony! For to satisfy herself first is the negation
of motherhood.
We have heard much of late years - and rightly - of the exploitation of
women by men. Let us not celebrate our growing enfranchisement by becoming
ourselves the exploiters; and that, not of men, but of babes.
IV
THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALITY
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom: -
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
W. Shakespeare.
"He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not
your own?" (I. Cor. vi., 18-19.)
I said in an earlier chapter that I wanted to find a moral standard which
should be based on the realities of human nature, and in order to do that
we must first have a clear idea of what human nature really is, and by what
law it lives. We have been passing during the last generation from an idea
of law which belonged to our forefathers to a new idea of law which has
been given to us by modern science; and in transition we still talk in
ambiguous terms about "law" - moral "law," for instance - confusing ourselves
between a law that is imposed on us from outside, a law that is passed by
Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of
the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has
revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law
of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean
that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain
way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material - being what it
is - behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is _the law
of being_ of that which obeys the law. It obeys it because it is its
nature to do so. If we could get a firm, hold of that idea of law, our own
legislation would not be so senseless as it often is; for we should try to
discover what is the nature of human beings - their real nature, about which
we are often deceived - and we should try to make our laws, including our
moral laws, those to which human nature, at its best, would most naturally
and fully respond. That is the conception that is at the back of the great
phrase which sounds like a paradox in one of the Collects of the English
Prayer Book: "Whose service is perfect freedom." "Whose service is perfect
freedom"; that is to say, when you obey God, you find perfect freedom
because you are doing what it is your true nature to do. And that is why I
want to base our moral law, our moral standard, on the realities of human
nature. But, you will reply, when people are free to act as they choose
they sometimes choose to violate their own nature. I cannot say how that
happens; it involves the entire problem of evil; and I do not propose even
to attempt to deal with it in this book. I will only say that our confusion
has arisen, as I think, out of the very fact that instead of obeying the
law of our being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we
hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That
is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why,
as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments on human beings.
Before, then, we can rightly establish our moral standard we have to decide
what human nature really is, and when we have done that we shall know what
is really moral. I suppose that sounds like a paradox to many, because they
think that morality is always "going against" human nature. If people do
anything that is generally called "immoral," they will excuse themselves on
the grounds of human nature; they will say: "After all, _human nature being
what it is_, you must expect this, that and the other kind of licence and
immorality"; and to say that morality, real morality, can only be based
on the realities of human nature will therefore sound to many of you the
wildest kind of paradox. But I want to pursue it just as though it were
true, because I believe it is true.
What, then, are the realities of our nature? Here is one: a human being is
not and never can be cut off from other human beings. He is not alone. He
cannot consider himself only. If he does so he violates his own nature,
because it is not his nature to be alone, and he cannot act without his
actions affecting other people. He cannot think, he cannot feel, he cannot
act or speak without affecting other people, and it is futile for anyone
to say: "It does not matter to others what I do; nobody knows; it concerns
only myself." Your innermost thought affects the whole world in which you
live, and whatever moral standard you are going to adopt, you must take
it for granted that your standard will affect other people, and that it is
absolutely impossible for you to act or think alone.
And then human beings are three-fold in nature. They have a body, a
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