not blamed
because, one winter's afternoon, he made a snow-statue for Lorenzo de
Medici! Yet all will admit that _merely_ to amuse, _merely_ to make money,
_merely_ to gain popularity is a prostitution of genius. Why? Because it
is to put to another than its real purpose the creative power of a great
artist.

In the same way, to use the power of another great creative impulse--that
of sex--in a way which divorces it wholly from its end--creation on
the physical as well as the spiritual plane--is immoral because it is
"unnatural." Again and again it will be found to lead to a violent reaction
of feeling--a repulsion which is as intense and violent as the devotion
which was its prelude.

What then should those do who have this temperament? No one, perhaps, can
wisely counsel them but themselves. They alone can find out the way by
which the disharmony of their being can be transcended. That it can be so
I am persuaded. That modern psychology has already made strides in the
knowledge of this problem we all know. What is due to arrested development
or to repression can be set right or liberated: what is temperamental
transmuted. But I appeal to those who know this, but who have suffered and
do still suffer under this difficulty, to make it their business to let in
the light, to help others, to know themselves, to learn how to win harmony
out of disharmony and to transcend their own limitations. Let them take
hold of life there where it has hurt them most cruelly, and wrest from
their own suffering the means by which others shall be saved from suffering
and humanity brought a little further into the light. Who knows yet of what
it is capable? Who knows what is our ultimate goal? It may be that out of
a nature so complex and so difficult may come the noblest yet, when the
spirit has subdued the warring temperament wholly to itself.

And to the others I would say this. If the homosexual is still the most
misunderstood, maltreated, and suffering of our race, it is due to our
ignorance and brutal contempt. How many have even tried to understand? How
many have refrained from scorn? Other troubles have been mitigated, other
griefs respected if not understood. But this we refuse even to discuss.
We are content to condemn in ignorance, boasting that we are too good
to understand. In consequence, though a few here and there have preached
homosexuality as a kind of gospel, far more have suffered an agony of
shame, a self-loathing wh