l but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in
Nature." Without chastity it is impossible to maintain the dignity of
sexual love. The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in
the last stages of degeneration. Chastity has for sexual love an
importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.

It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many
men of high moral and intellectual distinction pronounced very decidedly
their condemnation of the ideal of chastity. The great Buffon refused to
recognize chastity as an ideal and referred scornfully to "that kind of
insanity which has turned a girl's virginity into a thing with a real
existence," while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared
at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is "the
most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature." Blake, though he seems
always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense,
felt nothing but contempt for chastity, and sometimes confers a kind of
religious solemnity on the idea of unchastity. Shelley, who may have been
unwise in sexual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often
seems to associate religion and morality, not with chastity, but with
unchastity, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69]

But all these men--with other men of high character who have pronounced
similar opinions--were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional
forms of chastity. They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were
seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a
mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.

We cannot accept an ideal of chastity unless we ruthlessly cast aside all
the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. If chastity is merely a
fatiguing effort to emulate in the sexual sphere the exploits of
professional fasting men, an effort using up all the energies of the
organism and resulting in no achievement greater than the abstinence it
involves, then it is surely an unworthy ideal. If it is a feeble
submission to an external conventional law which there is no courage to
break, then it is not an ideal at all. If it is a rule of morality imposed
by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of
revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced
by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality
based on misconceptio