s
easily excited, and in the end the unfortunate finds that he has yielded
again. His hard fight has only ended in defeat, and he either abandons the
advice as mistaken, or himself as hopelessly and uniquely depraved.

The truth is, of course, that what is needed is not physical exhaustion
any more than physical idleness and overfeeding. What is wanted is hard
and _interesting_ work--work that absorbs one's mental as well as physical
strength. A boy at a public school who really cares for games can pour
his energies into them and appear a fine example of the system; a boy who,
though games are compulsory, cannot interest himself in them at all, is not
helped by being physically exhausted. If, then, he yields to a temptation
the other has escaped, this need not be because he is more wicked or more
weak. It may quite well be because the insistence on athleticism, which has
been elevated into a cult, in our public schools, has supplied a real and
absorbing interest for the one, but has merely used the physical capacity
of the other without touching his mind or his spirit at all. When shall
we learn that every human being is a unity, and that to ignore any part of
it--body, mind or spirit--is idiotic? The muscular Christian who believes
that continence is achieved by physical fatigue is as short-sighted as he
who would treat the whole matter as a purely ethical problem. But the man
or woman who works hard at some congenial and absorbing task--especially if
it be creative work--finds the virtue of continence well within his grasp
without exhaustion and without asceticism. It is because sex is essentially
a creative--the creative--power in humanity that we have to direct its
force into some more spiritual channel than mere physical labour, if we are
to make ourselves its master.

Again, an increasing number of us believe that to master our physical
impulses is possible; and that it has seemed impossible--at least,
for men--in the past largely because so little knowledge and so little
common-sense has been used in achieving mastery. Naturally, it was simpler
to assume that it was impossible to control oneself than to find out how
to make it possible, but as we grow more civilized we cease to be perfectly
content with this simple plan, and begin to perceive its extraordinary
injustices and brutalities. It has been said that the civilization of any
people or period may be judged by the position of its women, and though
this is t