elp, or without it, I have followed my own path to the
end.

For it so happens that I come on both sides of my house from stocks of
Englishmen who, nearly three hundred years ago, had encountered just these
same difficulties and dangers before. In the seventeenth century, indeed,
the battle was around the problem of religion, as to-day it is around the
problem of sex. Since I have of late years realized this analogy I have
often thought of certain admirable and obscure men who were driven out,
robbed, and persecuted, some by the Church because the spirit of
Puritanism moved within them, some by the Puritans because they clung to
the ideals of the Church, yet both alike quiet and unflinching, both alike
fighting for causes of freedom or of order in a field which has now for
ever been won. That victory has often seemed of good augury to the perhaps
degenerate child of these men who has to-day sought to maintain the causes
of freedom and of order in another field.

It sometimes seems, indeed, a hopeless task to move the pressure of inert
prejudices which are at no point so obstinate as this of sex. It may help
to restore the serenity of our optimism if we would more clearly realize
that in a very few generations all these prejudices will have perished and
be forgotten. He who follows in the steps of Nature after a law that was
not made by man, and is above and beyond man, has time as well as eternity
on his side, and can afford to be both patient and fearless. Men die, but
the ideas they seek to kill live. Our books may be thrown to the flames,
but in the next generation those flames become human souls. The
transformation is effected by the doctor in his consulting room, by the
teacher in the school, the preacher in the pulpit, the journalist in the
press. It is a transformation that is going on, slowly but surely, around
us.

I am well aware that many will not feel able to accept the estimate of the
sexual situation as here set forth, more especially in the final volume.
Some will consider that estimate too conservative, others too
revolutionary. For there are always some who passionately seek to hold
fast to the past; there are always others who passionately seek to snatch
at what they imagine to be the future. But the wise man, standing midway
between both parties and sympathizing with each, knows that we are ever in
the stage of transition. The present is in every age merely the shifting
point at which past and futur