countless others who have followed them—learned to transmute that great creative force, disdained both choices which I set before you, finding a nobler and more glorious way. These would neither repress this great impulse, nor dissipate it, but so used it for the service of man that there is in all the history of man no life more rich, more human, more full of love, more full of creation, or more full of power, than the lives of these celibate men and women, who learned from Christ how they could live and love.

It is not easy for men and women this way, but it is possible. It is possible, and it is glorious; and, in its degree, the need for it comes to everyone. Do not imagine that it is not needed in marriage as well as out of marriage. Every married lover will tell you that if his love is to remain what it was in the beginning—if it is rather to grow in power and beauty—he also must be able gradually to transmute his love in such a way that the spirit dominates the flesh more and more, and that the physical side of marriage becomes simply an expression of the love of the spirit, the perfect final expression, the sacrament of love. Do not imagine that this is not needed, this effort, and this power, by every human being who desires to be human in his love, and not something less than human. And to those to whom the need comes in its sternest form, I will not pretend for a moment that it is not hard. Nay, I will prophesy to you that if you do so choose to serve the world, it will to all of you sometimes seem too hard. With Christ, with St. Francis, your human nature will sometimes assert itself. "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man"—the Servant of Humanity—has no such joy. But of whatever life you choose, that is sometimes true. To the finest spirit in marriage there comes sometimes the thought that, but for this great claim, he might have undertaken some adventure, might have answered some call, which now he cannot answer. Does that mean that he regrets his choice? No, not for a moment! It only means that human nature is so rich and so varied that whatever life you forego will sometimes seem to you the better choice. You will think, for a moment, that you might have chosen differently. If that happened to St. Francis, believe me, it will happen to you. But yet, is it not a heroic path that I point out to you? Is it not possible that to this generation heroism may be possible in such a way, on such a scale, that you will leave this world nobler in moral stature because of the hardness which you endured, the choice that you made? Women, to whom this comes home specially at this time, may it not be that you, by taking this way, will become the mothers in spirit of women in a happier generation, on whom will never again be imposed our cramped, stifling, sub-human conception of what women ought to be? You will show to the world not only that the individual woman of genius may have a value to Humanity beyond her sex, but that every woman has that value. In solving your own problem, and taking hold of life where most it hurts you, you will end by making a moral standard nobler, a humanity richer and more human, a womanhood freer, greater, more Christlike than it was. And future generations shall rise up and call you blessed.

III

CONSIDERATION OF OTHER SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE DISPROPORTION OF THE SEXES

       "My spirit's bark is driven
     Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
     Whose sails were never to the tempest given."

Shelley: "Adonais."

Let us now move away from that aspect of the moral problem which has concerned us hitherto—that of the difficulties created by the disproportion of the sexes at this time and in this country—and consider the problem as it presents itself under more normal conditions. For even in ages and in countries where there are an equal number of men and women there are difficulties in their relations with one another, and a "moral problem."

People ask, for example, whether sex-relationships should be governed by law at all; whether they should continue in any given case when passion has died, or when love (which is more than passion) has gone. Should love ever be other than perfectly free, and is not the attempt to bind it essentially "immoral"? Should it ever be exclusive or proprietary? Is not the "moral problem" really created, not by human nature, but by the attempt to bind what cannot be bound and to coerce what should be free?

The answer given to such questions is often to-day on the side of what is called, mistakenly, I think, "free love." And in considering this answer, I want to remind you that it is often given by people who are most sincere, most idealistic, in their own lives and in their own love. Indeed it has often been pointed out that it is at times of great spiritual exaltation and fervour that the cult of "free love" is most likely to find adherents. The great principle that "love is the fulfilling of the law" is held with a fervour which makes any question as to what love is, and how much it involves, seem half-hearted and cold. Those who preach this doctrine remind us—and very justly—of the weakness and insincerity of the "orthodox" moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom. They revolt against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a woman "a hold over her husband" when he has "grown tired of her," or as justifying a man in enforcing upon his wife the rights which only love makes right, when she has grown tired of him. I appeal, therefore, to those to whom the dispassionate discussion of "free love" seems quite outrageous, to remember that there are those to whom this teaching is not a mere excuse for licence, but an attempt to reach something lovelier and nobler than the present moral code, whose failures and insincerities no thinking person can ignore.

In considering this view, I want first to point out that although to have no legal or enforceable tie in sex-relationships seems on the surface much the simplest and easiest way to arrange life, although permanent monogamous marriage is exceedingly difficult and inconvenient, yet the movement of humanity does seem to have been on the whole in that direction. It is, of course, untrue to say that among primitive peoples there is anything that can fairly be called promiscuity. Historians and anthropologists have taught us that among all peoples, however barbarous, there are conventions, sanctions, tabus, by which the relations of men and women are regulated. The customs of such people may seem to us mere licence; but they are not so. And some of the customs of more "civilized" countries are at least as horrifying to the "savage" as his can be to us. Nevertheless, it is true to say that as civilization advances, and especially where the position of women improves, the movement has been towards a more stable and exclusive form of marriage. We grope uncertainly towards it: we fail atrociously. Yet we do not abandon an ideal which asks so much of human nature that human nature is continually invoked to prove its impossibility.

Why have we persisted? It is idle to speak of monogamy as though it were a senseless rule imposed on unfortunate humanity by some all-powerful Superman. We have imposed it on ourselves. It is our doing. Why have we done it? Surely because, in spite of its alleged "impossibility," its obvious inconveniences, there is some need in human nature which demands a permanent and a stable sex relationship to meet it.

I believe that there is something in our human nature which desires stability in its relations with other human beings. It is perhaps a recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its conditions, we are immortal