is moral? If you marry
for any reason but love--for experience, to "complete your nature"--without
much regard to the man or woman you marry, or to the children you bring
into the world, are you not exploiting human nature just as certainly,
though not so brutally, as a man who buys a woman in the street? It is not
so base a form of exploitation, God knows; that I admit; but when there
is _any_ element of exploitation in the bargain it is not made more truly
moral because it happens to be blessed in a church or registered in an
office. The legal ceremony must be the outcome of a morality which makes
you realize that what you do affects other people, that what you do
most profoundly affects the children that you hope to have, and that the
community has both an interest and a responsibility in all this. That is
"moral." But if the relationship thus to be legalized is not moral, it is
dishonest to pretend that it can be made so by any ceremony which those
concerned may undergo.

But, you will say, we cannot peer into other people's lives and judge them
in this kind of way. How are we to know? How are we, who have many friends,
many neighbours, on whom our standards must react, to judge their lives?
We can tell who has gone through a legal ceremony and who refuses to do
so. That is a nice convenient rule by which we can judge and condemn such
people. But we cannot go poking into people's lives and studying their
motives and judging their fundamental moral standards! No, you cannot. Why
should you? This little set of iron rules makes it very easy to judge, does
it not? But why do you desire it to be easy to judge? You and I know how
infinite are the gradations between the most noble kind of chastity and
the most ignoble kind of immorality; but which of us is to create a rigid
standard and measure our friends and acquaintances against it? We do not
do it with the other virtues: why do we desire to do it with this one?
Take such a virtue as truth. Conceive the crystalline sincerity of some
truth-loving minds, realize that some have such a devotion to truth that
the faintest shadow of insincerity--not a lie, but the merest shadow of
insincerity in the depths of their hearts--is abhorrent to them. Consider
the infinite gradations between that mind and the mind which takes a lie
for truth, a mind that is rotten with corruption, that does not know how to
think straight, let alone care to speak straight. You do not draw up your
lit