y made in heaven. Let us get to work
instead to see that the marriages of the future shall be made in heaven,
and, above all, let us abolish the idea that a marriage is a real marriage
which is based on ignorance, on fraud, on exploitation, on selfishness. Let
us not dream that we can raise our standard of morals, by affirming that
every mistake that men and women make in a matter in which mistaking is
so tragically easy ought to imprison them in a lie for the rest of their
lives. But let us take the ideal of Christ, in all its grandeur and all
its reality, with our eyes fixed upon the ideal, but with that respect
for human personality, that respect for reality and truth, which makes us
refuse to accept the pretence that all the marriages we have known have
been made by God. Let us, at least, in perpetuating such blasphemies as
are some of the marriages on which we have seen the blessing of the Church
invoked, cease to drag in the name of Christ to the defence of a system
which has laid all its weight upon a legal contract, and kept a conspiracy
of silence about the sacred union of body and soul by which God makes man
and woman one.

VI

A PLEA FOR LIGHT

Jesus said: "If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not,
because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in
the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him."

My last address for the present[C] on the difficult questions that we have
been considering here, Sunday after Sunday, is a plea for light.

[Footnote C: Another address was added a few weeks later in response to
urgent requests.]

"Walking in darkness" has been, in sexual matters, the experience of most
of us. Even now, in the twentieth century, it is not too much to say that
most of us have had to fight our battle in almost complete darkness and
something very near to complete isolation.

There are two great passions connected with the bodies of men and women,
so fundamental that they have moulded the histories of nations and the
development of the human race. They are the hunger for food and the
instinct of sex. There is no other passion connected with our bodies so
fundamental, so powerful, as these two; and yet, with regard to the second,
most of us are expected to manage our lives and to grow up into maturity
without any real knowledge at all, and with such advice as we get wrapped
up in a jargon that we do not understand. We have been as those who set