g its first uncertain steps. Even if you
do none of these things, yet if you will try to understand yourselves, by
the mere fact that you understand, you will find that you are able to help
other people--other people whose condition is most tragic, most lonely--to
face with courage the problem they share with you.[D] Try to solve it, as
you can. You will gain in understanding and strength, so that those in yet
greater need will instinctively come to you for help. Base your own moral
standard on all that is noble, and wise and human, and you will find that
in you the spiritual begins so to dominate the physical that others will
see its power and come to you for help.

[Footnote D: This subject is more fully dealt with in the next chapter.]

"With aching hands and bleeding feet,
We toil and toil; lay stone on stone.
Not till the light of day return
All we have built shall we discern."

Now let us turn to the other side of the problem--the more normal relations
of men and women who are lovers, who are husbands and wives. May I again
recapitulate what appears to be the history of many married people, even in
1921.

Let me remind you first that this contract of marriage is the most
important, probably, in the whole life of the man and woman who undertake
it; that it concerns human personality as perhaps no other relation in the
world does, so deeply, so closely, so intimately, that those who enter into
it are very near either to heaven or hell. The nearer you come to any
other human personality, the nearer you get to the supreme happiness or the
supreme failure. And when people enter on this relationship, how are they
prepared? Many of them are ignorant--and in the case of women often wholly
so--of what marriage actually involves. I find it difficult to speak in
measured terms of those parents who deliberately allow their daughters to
take a step which involves the whole of their future life and happiness,
and that of another human being also, in ignorance of what they are doing.
This relationship, which requires all the love and all the wisdom of men
and women--so much so that even those who do not call themselves Christians
often desire to go to a church and ask for the grace of God to enable
them to carry out so great an undertaking--is entered upon by people who
literally do not know what, from the very nature of marriage, is required
of them. I suppose many people will say that I speak of a state of things
w