have existed without indelicacy,
and that they were but living proof of their fathers' lapses and their
mothers' humiliation? Is He whom we address daily as "Our Father"
willing to be described by a name with which impurity is of necessity
connected? And has He implanted in us as the strongest of our
instincts that which cannot elevate and must debase?

Again: it needs no wide experience of life, nor any very indulgent
view of it, to feel some truth at least in the words Tennyson puts
into the mouth of his ideal man:

"Indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid
Not only to keep down _the base in man_,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire for fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man."

And yet this passion is indisputably sexual passion, and the chastest
of lovers has bodily proof that the most spiritual of his kisses is
allied to the supreme embrace of love. Our body is the instrument by
which all our emotions are expressed. The most obvious way of
expressing affection is by bodily contact. The mother fondles her
child, kisses its lips and its limbs, and presses it to her breast.
Young children hold hands, put their arms round one another and kiss;
and, although later we become less demonstrative, we still take our
friend's arm, press his hand with ours, and lay a hand upon his
shoulder; we pat our horse or dog and stroke our cat. The lover
returns to the spontaneous and unrestrained caresses of his childhood.
These become more and more intimate until they find their consummation
in the most intimate and most sacred of all embraces. From first to
last these caresses--however deep the pleasure they bestow--are sought
by the mother or the lover, not _for the sake of_ that pleasure, but
as a means of expressing emotion. He only who realises this fact and
conforms to it can enter on married life with any certainty of
happiness. The happiness of very many marriages is irretrievably
shattered at the outset through the craving for sexual excitement
which, in the absence of wise guidance, grows up in every normal boy's
heart, and by the contemplation of sexual intercourse as an act of
physical pleasure.

And once again: It is the experience of those who have given
instruction in sex questions to the young that by those whose minds
have never been defiled the instruction is received