iseases are bred in the swamp
of immorality, just as certainly as malaria is bred in the mosquito-haunted
pools of the malaria swamp. Drain the swamp, and you get rid of the
malaria, for there is no longer any place for the malaria-bearing mosquito
to breed. Drain the swamp of immorality, and you get rid of venereal
disease, because there is no longer a place where these diseases can breed.
Live rightly, and your nature will respond in health. When human beings
elect to make their relations with one another promiscuous--when, that is
to say, they treat themselves as animals--they are not obeying, they are
violating the law of their own being; for they are not animals only, and
to treat themselves as such is to disobey the law of their own nature. And
disobedience reacts in disease.

So again, the relations of men and women are of the mind as well as of the
body and the spirit. You cannot rule out your mind, and I think that those
who believe, as many do today, not indeed in a merely animal promiscuity,
but in rather casual relations between men and women--experiments, if you
like, men and women passing from one union to another--rule out the fact
that a human being has a mind, a memory and foresight; that our being
includes a past, and, in a sense, includes a future also; and when you try
to divorce your physical experience from your intellectual and emotional
being you are again violating the law of your own nature.

I remember asking one of the most happily married women that I know to put
into words, if she could, the reason why she believed that married people,
married lovers, should not have gone through other relationships with other
people before they gave themselves to one another. I asked her to express
in words what seemed to her immoral. She wrote this: "In the ideal union
between God and man, we know that man must give the fulness of his being,
body, mind and spirit, throughout his whole life, to God, and that anything
less than this, though it may be fine and noble, does fall short of
perfection. It is the same with the human love of men and women. The
'fulness of our being' which we desire to give to our lover consists not
only in what we are at any given moment but in what we have been in the
past, what we may become in the future. And so in the formation of
merely temporary unions the highest and deepest unity can never be fully
achieved." She went on to say: "When we have passed beyond the physical
sphe