just as
much as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of
more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of
the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what
Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to
the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral
discipline which extends its fortifying influence to men and women alike.

It is this universality of sexual emotion, blending in its own mighty
stream, as is now realised, many other currents of emotion, even the
parental and the filial, and traceable even in childhood,--the wide
efflorescence of an energy constantly generated by a vital internal
mechanism,--which renders vain all attempts either to suppress or to
ignore the problem of sex, however immensely urgent we might foolishly
imagine such attempts to be. Even the history of the early Christian
ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in the contemporary _Paradise_ of
Palladius, illustrates the futility of seeking to quench the unquenchable,
the flame of fire which is life itself. These "athletes of the Lord" were
under the best possible conditions for the conquest of lust; they had been
driven into the solitude of the desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse,
they could regulate their lives as they would, and they possessed an
almost inconceivable energy of resolution. They were prepared to live on
herbs, even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of self-denial. They
were so scrupulous that we hear of a holy man who would even efface a
woman's footprints in the sand lest a brother might thereby be led into
thoughts of evil. Yet they were perpetually tempted to seductive visions
and desires, even after a monastic life of forty years, and the women seem
to have been not less liable to yield to temptation than the men.

It may be noted that in the most perfect saints there has not always been
a complete suppression of the sexual impulse even on the normal plane, nor
even, in some cases, the attempt at such complete suppression. In the
early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently
combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the
sexes which shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh century we
find that the charming and saintly Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the
order of Fontevrault, would often s