Ezra: "Nor soul helps flesh
more, now, than flesh helps soul."

We may consider, first, how, in matters of sex, flesh helps soul; second,
how soul helps flesh; and third, how in normal childhood and youth soul
and flesh grow together in mutual help.

The first great outstanding fact is that the physical powers of sex reach
maturity in the same years in which the moral and religious instincts are
greatly quickened. If we recall our youth, we must realize that, in the
years between twelve and twenty, our lives were greatly disturbed and
perplexed, and also greatly exalted and inspired by desires and impulses
partly toward the opposite sex and partly toward the service of God and
our fellows. In the normal adolescent boy or girl there is a powerful
expanding and enriching of sex thoughts and desires and purposes. There is
also a rapid development of social sympathy and passion; the revolutionary
movements of all lands are recruited from those who like Shelley have in
their youth vowed,--

"I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check."

And there is a wonderful flowering of the young life in religious feeling
and aspiration; a large majority of religious conversions take place in
adolescence.

We can scarcely escape the conviction that these are not different
awakenings, but rather different phases of the one great awakening of the
young life as it prepares for the tasks and responsibilities of manhood
and womanhood. The part that sex development plays in this awakening has
been variously stressed by different special students of the physiology
and psychology of adolescence. Some scientists have not hesitated to give
it first place and to treat social passion and religious enthusiasm as
secondary manifestations of sex energy.[59] However that may be, we know
that each speaks naturally in terms of the other. The religious mystic of
the Middle Ages was devoted to the Divine Lover or the Heavenly Lady, and
the modern revolutionary is _wedded_ to the Cause. On the other hand, the
lover naturally adopts the language of religion to express his devotion to
the lady of his heart. The water-tight compartment theory of life is in
these days thoroughly discredited. We know that the various powers of soul
and body are related and interdependent, and we feel sur