on finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:--
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

W. Shakespeare.

"He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not
your own?" (I. Cor. vi., 18-19.)

I said in an earlier chapter that I wanted to find a moral standard which
should be based on the realities of human nature, and in order to do that
we must first have a clear idea of what human nature really is, and by what
law it lives. We have been passing during the last generation from an idea
of law which belonged to our forefathers to a new idea of law which has
been given to us by modern science; and in transition we still talk in
ambiguous terms about "law"--moral "law," for instance--confusing ourselves
between a law that is imposed on us from outside, a law that is passed by
Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of
the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has
revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law
of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean
that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain
way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material--being what it
is--behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is _the law
of being_ of that which obeys the law. It obeys it because it is its
nature to do so. If we could get a firm, hold of that idea of law, our own
legislation would not be so senseless as it often is; for we should try to
discover what is the nature of human beings--their real nature, about which
we are often deceived--and we should try to make our laws, including our
moral laws, those to which human nature, at its best, would most naturally
and fully respond. That is the conception that is at the back of the great
phrase which sounds like a paradox in