s will occur to the reader, especially if he or she becomes in
any way a soldier in this war, whether publicly or as a parent
instructing children, or on any other of the many fields where the fight
rages.

It is not the purpose of the present chapter to deal with that which
must be said, notwithstanding prudery, and in order that the price of
prudery shall no longer be paid. But one final principle may be laid
down which is indeed perhaps merely an expression of the spirit
underlying the foregoing remarks upon our terminology. It is that we are
to fly our flag high. We may consult Mrs. Grundy's prejudices if we find
that in doing so we may directly serve our own thinking, and therefore
our cause. This is very different from any kind of apologizing to her.
All such I utterly deplore. We must not begin by granting Mrs. Grundy's
case in any degree. Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she
calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms
of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about sex and
parenthood which is inherently base and unclean. The origin of this
notion is of interest, and the anthropologists have devoted much
attention to it. It is to be found intermingled with a by no means
contemptible hygiene in the Mosaic legislation, is to be traced in the
beliefs and customs of extant primitive peoples, and has formed and
forms an element in most religions. But it is not really pertinent to
our present discussion to weigh the good and evil consequences of this
belief. Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some
surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of
false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of
morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been
served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean,
and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.

But for our own day and days yet unborn this notion of sex and its
consequences as unclean or the worser part is to be condemned as not
merely a lie and a palpably blasphemous one, grossly irreligious on the
face of it, but as a pernicious lie, and to be so recognized even by
those who most joyfully cherish evidence of the practical value of lies.
Whatever may have been the case in the past or among present peoples in
other states of culture than our own, no impartial person can question
that during the Christian Era what may be