they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably
apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It
is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women
whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better
ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by
fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are
no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even
when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of
virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.
If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust. If it
was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish
for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to
imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.

So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents
circles round again to that of the parents to the child. The wise parent
realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of
later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and
not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be
cast. Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an
inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in
knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and no
doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth and takes place of
itself.

CHAPTER II

THE MEANING OF PURITY

I

We live in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two
antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of
sexual purity, both flowing from the far past.

The people who embody one of these streams of tradition, basing themselves
on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert,
that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like
other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise
philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had,
moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as
Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike.
It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the crudest terms, and
often by people who, not following Luther's example, use i