we cannot too often repeat, constitute
a mighty source of energy which we can never altogether repress though by
wise guidance we may render it an aid not only to personal development
and well-being but to the moral betterment of the world. The attraction of
sex, according to a superstition which reaches far back into antiquity, is
a baleful comet pointing to destruction, rather than a mighty star to
which we may harness our chariot. It may certainly be either, and which it
is likely to become depends largely on our knowledge and our power of
self-guidance.

In old days when, as we have seen, tradition, aided by the most fantastic
superstitions, insisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole emphasis
was placed against passion. Since knowledge and self-guidance, without
which passion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then usually
absent, the emphasis was needed, and when Boehme, the old mystic, declared
that the art of living is to "harness our fiery energies to the service of
the light," it has recently been even maintained that he was the solitary
pioneer of our modern doctrines. But the ages in which ill-regulated
passion exceeded--ages at least full of vitality and energy--gave place to
a more anaemic society. To-day the conditions are changed, even reversed.
Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now. We are in
no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the
explosive splendour of our social life. We possess, moreover, knowledge
in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly
they may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more passion and fuller,
that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place
these many years is with the dead. For we know what happens in a world
when those who ban passion have triumphed. When Love is suppressed Hate
takes its place. The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside
the orgies of Hate. When nations that might well worship one another cut
one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and
Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the
world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows
flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is
not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may
happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to
carry on th