ys and young men, how many young women and girls have struggled to do so,
and are trying to do so to-day, with a sense always of guilt and shame
in their minds, laying up mental difficulties for themselves, the
psychologists tell us, by this repression. You know the type; you know the
kind of person who becomes hard and narrow and uncomprehending. That is
one type. You can read it in their faces. The pinched look, the cramped
mentality reflects itself in the body and in the face. And then there is
the other type, those who have rejected this attitude towards life, denying
that there is anything to be ashamed of in the natural impulse of their
sex, or cause for regret if they give rein to that whose repression does
so much harm, who frankly fling away the idea of self-control, because
repression has seemed such a disastrous method of self-control. You can see
it in their faces also; in the gradual demoralization of their nature.
The rake on one hand, the prude on the other, represent the ultimate
consequence of the process I am trying to describe. Many people have marked
on their souls, if not on their faces, one or other of these ways of life.
They have not, perhaps, gone far, they may have gone but a little way in
one direction or the other; but the mark on the soul remains all the same.
And when you see the extreme result, the prude on one side, the rake on
the other, do you not begin to desire a better way? To ask yourself whether
there is not a third choice before you?

I believe there is; and the choice is this: It is neither the repression
nor the degradation, but _transformation_ of the sex side of our nature.
I will take as the supreme example of that transformation the figure of
Christ Himself--Christ who had neither wife nor child--St. Francis of
Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Theresa of Spain. Four of the greatest
figures--One of them supreme--who were not "natural celibates" in the sense
that implies that they did not have surging through them the divine impulse
of creative love; for these are the greatest lovers the world has ever
seen, and compared with theirs even the great love of one man for one
woman, one woman for one man, is the lesser thing. But these great figures
in human history are those on whose hearts Humanity itself made such a
claim that it became impossible for them to give to one what was claimed by
all the world. You will see that this is not a denial of creative love, for
no one in th