ch have so much more respectable an air.
But yet do not sin under the impression that what you do concerns yourself
alone. Do not use, for your own satisfaction only, powers which were given
you for creation and for the world.

But this, you may say, is not the accepted standard of morality. That is a
matter rather of laws and ceremonies. And people begin to ask; "What real
difference can a mere ceremony make?" It does not make any difference to
the morality of your relationships with your fellow men and women. Nothing
that is immoral becomes moral because it has been done under a legal
contract, or consecrated by a rite. There, I think, is where the world has
gone so wrong. The idea that a relation that is selfish, cruel, mercenary,
becomes moral because someone has said some words over you, and you have
signed a register--what a farcical idea! How on earth does that change
anything at all? The morality of all civil or religious ceremony lies, I
think, in this--that by accepting and going through it, you accept the fact
that your love does concern others besides yourself; it will concern your
children; and beyond that, it concerns the world. You are right when you
ask your friends to come and rejoice with you at your wedding. It is the
concern of all the world when people love each other, and it is the failure
of _love_ that concerns them when marriage is a failure. Such failure
chills the atmosphere; it shakes our faith in love as the supreme power in
the universe; it makes us all waver in our allegiance to constancy and
love when love fails. It is a joyful thing when people love. "All the
world loves a lover." It is an old saying, but what a true one! It _is_ our
concern when people nobly and loyally love each other, it is the concern of
the community, and those who take upon themselves these public vows seem to
me to have a more truly moral conception of love than those who say: "This
is our affair only; it is not the affair of the State or the affair of the
Church." But the actual ceremony must be the expression of a moral feeling
such as that. It cannot in itself make moral what is immoral! The old
idea that if a woman was seduced by a man she was "made honest" by the man
marrying her is essentially immoral. Very likely all that she knew about
the man was that she could not trust him, and to suppose that we can set
right what is wrong by tying them together for the rest of their lives is
to imagine an absurdity and