Little Essays of Love and Virtue | Page 9

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 it to defend prostitution, though they generally
exclude women from its operation, as a sex to whom it fails to apply
and by whom it is not required.

But on the other hand we have another stream of platitude. On this side
there is usually little attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of
the opposing party, though they would contradict its conclusions. Their
theory, if they have one, would usually seem to be that sexual activity
is a response to stimulation from without or from within, so that if there
is no stimulation there will be no sexual manifestation. They would
preach, they tell us, a strenuous ideal; they would set up a wholesome
dictate of hygiene. The formula put forward on this basis usually runs:
Continence is not only harmless but beneficial. It is a formula which, in
one form or another, has received apparently enthusiastic approval in
many quarters, even from distinguished physicians. We need not be
surprised. A proposition so large and general is not easy to deny, and is
still more difficult to reverse; therefore it proves welcome to the
people--especially the people occupying public and professional
positions--who wish to find the path of least resistance, under pressure
of a vigorous section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness the
proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and
no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled
with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is
beautiful how can marriage make it cease to be so?
Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common
source far back in the primitive human world. All the emanations of the
human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were
mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met
with immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The
manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most
spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent
themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity.
They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no
things that men more sought to avoid, yet none to which they were
impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes of that primitive
conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that were thus evolved
and eventually bound up with the original impulse, compose the
streams of tradition that feed our modern world in