omen. I do not know of anything that makes understanding
harder between two people than the fact that one has had experiences and
associations which the other has not had and does not understand, because
they are on an entirely different level. These create between them,
with all the desire for understanding in the world, a barrier of
misunderstanding and incomprehension, which is all the more fatal because
it is so intangible, so obscure, so hard to put into words, so often
actually unconscious or subconscious in the mind of one or of the other.

Again, you must not think that you are altogether spirit, and here perhaps
it is the woman who is more apt to sin than the man. How often have I
talked to women who speak of the physical side of love as though it were
something base and unworthy! Such a conception of passion is inhuman, and
therefore it is not really moral. A woman who thinks of this sacrament of
love, for which perhaps the man who loves her has kept himself clean all
his life, as a base thing, and who treats it as though it were a concession
to something base in a man's nature, instead of being the very consecration
of body and soul at once, the sacrament of union, one of the loveliest
things in human nature--such a woman gives as great a shock to what is
sacred and lovely in her husband's nature as he when he brings with him
into his marriage the associations of the street. It is as hard, it is as
insulting, it makes marriage as difficult in understanding, one way as the
other. For it is not true that our bodies are vile and base; they are the
temples of the Holy Spirit.

Or if you think that you can stand alone, that what you do is the concern
of no one else, that your life is a solitary thing, so solitary that no man
or woman is concerned, no one but yourself, and you may sin alone--there
again you misunderstand. You cannot stand alone, and nothing that you say
or think or do leaves the world unchanged. Is that difficult to believe in
these days, when psychology is teaching us how all-important thought is?
Ought you to find it hard to believe that what you do in the utmost secrecy
affects others, since it affects you, and no man lives to himself alone?
I do not wish to exaggerate. I have a horror of those books and people who
speak in exaggerated terms of any kind of sexual lapse. I am persuaded that
human beings can rise from such mistakes, and rise much more easily than
from the subtler spiritual sins whi