the true, the
beautiful, the victorious way out of so much discouragement and so much
crime,--that is the word "consecration." That word includes two essential
ideas, the ideas of sacredness and cooperation. The problems of sex will
never be solved until the sacredness of sex is recognized, for sex is
vitally and indissolubly bound up with the two greatest facts that you
and I know. The greatest fact of the organized world around us is life,
the greatest fact of the spiritual world into which we lift our souls is
love, and the beginnings of life and the beginnings of love are in sex. No
boy or girl will readily understand what life means except as he has some
clear, wise teaching about sex; no boy or girl will fully understand what
love means except through recognition of the dignity and worth and purity
of the fundamental facts and powers of sex.

Who shall give this enlightenment? I think it must be clear that this
enlightenment cannot be given by the very young and inexperienced person,
that the facts can be rightly given only by some person who knows their
sacredness for himself or herself. They can be given best by a mature
person who has seen and felt what they mean. In the long run, I have no
doubt that our boys and girls will get the information that they must have
from their parents, for the father and the mother are the best qualified
to give it. I have named both the father and the mother, for the solution
of our problem is not only in knowing the sacredness of sex, it is also
in working together for the elevation of sex life. We shall not be able,
we men, in the future, to sit down and say, "Oh, well, John will learn
from his mother"; "Mary's mother will make that clear to her"; "Their
mother does these things." It will not be possible for the socializing of
the sex instincts and the ripening of the sex powers to be made clear to
young people except as men and women both recognize the sacredness of the
sex relation and undertake to make things clear to boys and girls. Men
must give up their selfish indifference to evil conditions, and
women--some women--must give up the bitterness and hardness that come into
their hearts and their faces when they think of the suffering that their
sex has endured at the hands of man. This is not a problem for one sex. It
cannot be solved by either half of the great whole of humanity. We know
this to be true in our personal life; it is equally true in our social
life. It is onl