e tasks of Love, to do good even in an evil world.

It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work
of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum
of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy. The things that
fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions
beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed. The entire
intrinsic purification of the soul, it was held by the great Spanish
Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes place at the moment when, provided the
soul is of good disposition, it sees God; he meant after death, but for us
the saying is symbolic of the living truth. It is only in the passion of
facing the naked beauty of the world and its naked truth that we can win
intrinsic purity. Not all, indeed, who look upon the face of God can live.
It is not well that they should live. It is only the metals that can be
welded in the fire of passion to finer services that the world needs. It
would be well that the rest should be lost in those flames. That indeed
were a world fit to perish, wherein the moralist had set up the ignoble
maxim: Safety first.

CHAPTER III

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE

What are the legitimate objects of marriage? We know that many people seek
to marry for ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that men may
marry to obtain a cheap domestic drudge or nurse, and that women may marry
to be kept when they are tired of keeping themselves. These objects in
marriage may or may not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely its
legitimate ends. We are here concerned to ascertain those ends of marriage
which are legitimate when we take the highest ground as moral and
civilised men and women living in an advanced state of society and
seeking, if we can, to advance that state of society still further.

The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear
them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis Man is
at one with all the mammals and most of the birds. If, indeed, we
disregard the originally less essential part of this end--that is to say,
the care and tending of the young--this end of marriage is not only the
primary but usually the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
mammal world. As a natural instinct, its achievement involves
gratification and well-being, but this bait of gratification is merely a
device of Nature's and not in itself an end having