Read Ebook: Men Women and God A Discussion of Sex Questions from the Christian Point of View by Gray A Herbert Arthur Herbert

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God forbid that we should banish chaff and jest from our common life, or pretend to be old while still we are young! God forbid that we should be prim and Puritan when the sun shines and life calls! There are no sillier things in life than the mere affectations of intellectuality. Mere solemnity is both an ugly and a futile thing, and nothing is duller than a constant enforced earnestness. I remember a dear old celibate professor of mine who, having met a number of self-consciously intellectual women, became so annoyed that at last when asked whether he did not rejoice in the higher education of women he broke out with the sentence, "No! I don't like clever women--I like silly girls." The story may be apocryphal. The man at least was human enough to have said it. All that I am pleading for is that men and women should cease to hide from one another the deeper interests and concerns that really are present in their lives--that they should not merely play together but should also think together.

As to the detailed manners and customs which should control comradeship I claim no authority to speak dogmatically, and, as I have said, I am sure the rising generation will have to settle these things for itself. I am at least sure that both the stately coldness of Lady Vere de Vere and the familiarity in which dignity is forgotten are fatal. I confess to the hope that the linking of arms and the slapping of one another on the shoulder are not going to be characteristics of social intercourse in the future. And as to kissing I confess myself unblushingly conservative--Victorian if you will. Nine times out of ten it may not be a thing worth making any fuss about. But it is a mistake. Partly, to put it bluntly, because kissing sometimes arouses desires which kissing cannot satisfy; and partly because it is, I believe, a fine instinct which suggests to both men and women that they should keep their kisses for the one person who will or may some day have love's right to them.

And now a last word to the people to whom at the beginning I offered an apology--to the exceptional young people who take no interest in the other sex. I do not commend your attitude. It is not wise. If it is in your case instinctive and spontaneous you need not worry, for nature will soon cure it. But if you have consciously adopted it, or are deliberately retaining it, you are making a serious mistake. You are not sexless beings, and by adopting this attitude you are repressing certain parts of your natures which will one day make their presence felt whether you like it or no, and possibly in unhappy and unnatural ways. Girl friendships cannot fully and finally satisfy any girl. Companionships with other men are insufficient for any man. Instincts in your beings which may not be denied demand something else.

If you have decided that there is nothing worth while in the fellowships that may exist between men and women, surely it is plain that you must be wrong, for the verdict of nine-tenths of mankind is against you. If you have in you any positive antagonism to the other sex, that is in itself a manifestation of your sexual nature, and a bad one.

There is a fine, breezy, sunny world full of beauty, interest, and deep satisfaction for our humanity, the doors of which you are closing on yourselves. If some people have traveled there unwisely or have lost their way in it, that is only a coward's reason for staying outside. Things may seem to be going very well with you in spite of your attitude while you are still in the early twenties--you may say that you are getting from life all that you want. But as you approach the thirties you will infallibly discover your mistake. Nature will then assert herself. A certain mysterious loneliness will overtake you, and life will lose its flavor. In all modern life there is no harder problem than the one which arises for those who without any will of their own have to face that situation. To court it is mere folly. As a matter of fact behind your attitude there lies concealed the attempt to deny your sex, and that is the one impossible thing to do. You may control it, discipline it, or sublimate it; but you will do nothing but make trouble for yourself till you have accepted it. If it annoys you to find that you are not sufficient in yourself for yourself--if in particular you resent the mere suggestion that the other sex should in any way be necessary to your completeness and happiness, you are really quarrelling with the established nature of things. You may do that if you like, but there is always only one end to the quarrel. It is we who get broken, not the eternal order.

LOVE

The crowning fact about sex is that it makes possible the experience of being in love. I am sure that all possibility of a right handling of sex problems depends upon a true understanding and valuation of love-- that beautiful and imperious emotion which masters and transforms both men and women, which is closely linked with the creative instinct, and which at a certain stage in its growth calls into being the whole group of tumultuous sensations and demands known as passion that it may achieve its own fulfillment. If we know the truth about this matter we shall with comparative ease answer most of the questions which arise in connection with sex.

The days that immediately follow this experience may not be happy days. Many a man has to serve and wait ere he can awaken love in her who is to him the one woman in the world. Many a woman has to wait and wonder and face distress. Then, too, till the stage of mutual acknowledgment is reached love makes men and women awkward. They do uncouth, crude, and clumsy things. They get into muddles. They make mistakes. It would seem that some delicate process of mutual adjustment is often necessary before two souls can really find each other, and while the stumbling preliminary days last, love is often a torture as well as a delight. Nor are the best lovers the most successful at first. A superficial emotion may be easily handled, but a deep one will upset a man and make him strange to himself. And so two people will maneuver and wander and baffle each other. They will often be sure and then uncertain by turns, and will wonder whether love does not chiefly mean hopeless complications.

But when two souls do really discover each other, then at once a new life begins, so radiant, beautiful, stimulating, and mysterious, that even the poets have failed to find sufficient words for it. In their hearts two lovers always know that this is what they were made for-- that this is the very core and essence of human existence. I think they generally know that they have been ushered into a house of life of which they are quite unworthy, and that they take their first steps therein in reverence and in awe.

Let me simply enumerate some of the manifest consequences of this love.

Its most obvious result is that it compels a man to work, and to work hard. We are mostly born slackers. We should like to take many holidays, and if we were left alone we would do it. But parentage binds us to the wheel. We discover that we have got to face the grind, because the plain alternative is that the bairns would starve. And so we do it. Of course at times we rebel. You may hear men every now and then complaining half cynically and half humorously that, having once been indiscreet enough to fall in love, they were thenceforth swept along by rapids till at last they found themselves involved in all the paraphernalia of family life from perambulators to doctor's bills. But there are few men who do not know in their hearts that the toils have been the making of them. If love led only to delights, it would ruin us. It is because it leads also to heavy labor that it makes us. It is because I see this so clearly that I am not so much distressed as some people are over the fact that motherhood also means very hard work. The great discoveries of the moral and spiritual worlds are only made in and through work--yes, and sometimes through work that is sheer grind. There is no other road to moral or spiritual maturity either for man or woman. I have this deeply rooted objection to inherited wealth-- that it makes possible an escape from this redeeming discipline, and by removing one of the normal consequences of love often leads to the spoiling of love.

Let us, however, be clear about this further fact--love does not merely lead to enforced labor, it also redeems that labor. Not merely does a man face up to his job because it is in a sense done for love's sake, but love itself supplies the necessary respite and counterbalance to the burden of toil. We all need recreations. The tightly drawn string must be relaxed. Moods come when normal and quite Christian men say, "Oh, I can't stick it any longer; I want to enjoy myself." We naturally demand that there should be an element of delight somewhere in life. Notoriously it is rather hard to come by. City crowds at night present the spectacle of people making huge and fevered efforts to run delight to earth and often achieving only pitiful failure. I believe the normal way in which delight ought to enter the lives of married people is just through their satisfaction in each other's society, enriched by the society of their children. When a man and a woman have made the right sort of home they escape finally from all fevered cravings after picture-houses and ball-rooms. There lies to hand for them that which will day after day refresh and delight them, and make them ready for to-morrow's toil.

It is life stories of this sort which alone reveal the meaning and purpose of God in making the sex interest so almighty and central in life. We do not understand love till we have thus looked on towards the end. When it is allowed to run its true course it does in this way redeem life.

If I am told that I have drawn a hopelessly idealized picture of married love, I can only reply by a blunt denial. Twenty-five years of intimate contact with ordinary people have taught me these things. The kind of life I have pictured is going on in uncounted small and unknown homes all over the country. It is going on with commonplace people who are neither very interesting nor very clever, but who are wise enough to be simple and human. The real wonder of love is just that it can lift two commonplace people into a life that is not commonplace. And that is just how most of us get our chance in life. The people who are going through these experiences are for the most part quiet people. We do not hear about them. They do not have novels written about them, and they supply no copy for the society newspapers. It is the other people who advertise their woes. It is the unhappily married who make a noise. Only the very greatest novelists can make a good novel out of the story of a successful marriage. But apparently almost anyone can produce stories that people will read if only he or she puts in enough highly colored material about the aberrations of lovers and the possible ways in which marriage can be wrecked. It is sheer untruth to say that most marriages are failures. In most indeed there are ups and downs. The most affectionate couples make mistakes and quarrel over trifles. Love does not make all tempers smooth in a hurry. But love does teach people how to get past such troubles. It does bring balance and repose into life for both husband and wife. It does tend to produce efficiency and health in those who handle it truly. It does make for normal and happy development.

It is only with this background of positive truth about normal love that I can approach the other questions which must be dealt with in this book. If we are going to inquire as to the sanctions of the received moral standards, and the reasons which make the moral struggle worth while--if we are going to find the truth about the way in which to conduct married life, and find any light on the question of birth control, it can only be in relation to the positive truth about love and its manifold reactions on human beings. We shall never learn to manage the emotions and desires which arise from our sexual natures until we have first understood what it is that nature is trying to achieve through these means. To a number of these further questions I shall pass on in the succeeding chapters.

I hope I may do so now on the assumption that anything is worth while if only we can conserve for ourselves the possibility of such a career of experience as I have outlined, and that whatever spoils such experience beforehand, or renders it impossible, is really an enemy both to our well-being and our happiness. If

"Life, with all it yields of joy and woe And hope and fear... Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love How love might be, hath been indeed and is,"

then the key to all morality and all sound practical wisdom is just to conserve at all costs our chance of knowing love--love pure, passionate, fruitful, and holy.

I ask myself whether I can say anything of use to those who love deeply and truly, but find their love unreturned. Many who read these pages may say to themselves that they can fully believe that mutual love is the way into a wonderful country of new and full life, but that for them love has meant only a great longing and a great pain. They could give generously and nobly. They have in them a great wealth of love which they long to spend lavishly; but because he or she remains indifferent they find themselves tormented by that which is best in them. There is something here harder to face than even the sorrow of widows or widowers. To have loved and lost might be said to be a tolerable situation compared with the feeling that one's love has not been wanted.

Those who have never known such a situation may speak lightly of it. Those who have will always want to deal gently and reverently with it. Plainly it has great dangers attached to it. It is easy for those who are facing it to allow themselves to become bitter and cynical. It must be hard for them not to feel that many who do enjoy the privilege of mutual love are shamefully ungrateful. And it must be harder still to escape pangs of jealousy at times when they see the light of joy in the eyes of lovers, or the pangs of something finer than jealousy when they feel the charm of little children.

I know of only one perfect resource for men or women in this situation. It lies in God. Other people always seem dull and uninteresting to those who want supremely one special person. But God is not uninteresting. He has to be sought. He is not found by the careless or the cowardly. But those who seek Him earnestly do find Him, and as a sense of His love and His reality steals into the heart healing begins at once. He restores the soul. He fills the hungry. He is sufficient. And when that has happened other people begin to seem lovable too, and the human love that seemed at one point not to be needed finds numbers of objects. No one who can love is an unimportant person in a world that is starving for more love of divine quality.

And this at least I can report for those whom it may interest--that I have known some very strong and gentle men, and some very brave, gracious and understanding women whose lives are very rich in blessing to other people, who know how to help the weak and comfort the sad, and in whose faces there shines the light of a great and patient faith. Having wondered for a time whence came these great endowments, I have learnt at last that they were prizes won in a great contest wherein having had to face the trial of love unreturned they learnt at last to accept their own sorrow without anger, and then to use their power of love in self-forgetfulness for other troubled souls.

Yes, there is that to be said--to be said with great respect and tenderness because love unreturned involves a very fiery trial--but to be said with conviction because it is most blessedly true.

FALLING IN LOVE AND GETTING ENGAGED

This will be a very short chapter, for there is only one thing which I feel moved to say on this subject, and yet it is so important that I put it in a chapter by itself. Put in a sentence it is this: Only real love offers a basis for a happy marriage, and real love is something more than physical attraction. If all young men and women knew that and would be strong enough to act upon it, there would be very few calamitous marriages in the future.

But let us face the facts. Mere physical attraction can be tremendously strong. It springs into existence sometimes between two people who hardly know each other. The explanation of it must lie in mysterious facts about our incarnate life which I certainly cannot analyze. Once it is there it is felt as an imperious summons to marriage. To each the other seems for the time being a wonderful person, to be desired beyond all others. Often the critical faculty in us is entirely suspended by this attraction; and "her" words seem wise, though in fact they are silly, and "he" seems noble, though in fact he is only an averagely decent man. Two such persons long ardently to be together, though they do not nearly always want to talk to each other. They are held by something they do not understand, but which moves them profoundly.

Now by some mysterious and kindly providence I believe it usually happens that this mutual attraction declares itself between two people who as they do get to know each other find that they are also attracted mentally and spiritually. Usually from this beginning a real fellowship between the two persons will grow up which involves nearly their whole personalities. Many people who fell in love at first sight have made splendid marriages. But it does not always happen so. Sometimes this physical attraction remains the only bond between two people. Sometimes in the other departments of life they actually fret and annoy one another. Sometimes a friendship refuses to grow up. Sometimes even while the attraction still exists contempt lurks behind it. And that means that it is entirely unsafe to get engaged on the basis of a mere physical attraction. There is really something impersonal about mere physical attraction. The individual as such is hardly an active agent in it. He or she is the victim of some great life force that seems to want to throw men and women together regardless of their mental and spiritual qualities. Behind a mutual physical attraction there must be some strange harmony between the two physical natures concerned. But that may be the whole truth of the situation. And to become engaged or married on that basis alone is just another instance of acting as if we were merely bodies, when we are not. It constitutes another attempt to forget mind, heart, and soul, and is therefore disastrous.

Therefore it is not enough that merely to look at "her" makes your blood run fast and your nerves tingle. It is not enough that the very sight of "him" should give you acute pleasure. Before a man and a woman get engaged they would do well to have some long talks together, and so to find out what their real interests are, and whether their general views and purposes in life are such as can possibly be harmonized. Marriage lasts for a long time, and is a poor affair when a husband is bored by his wife's conversation, or when a wife is repelled by her husband's views. Even to such there may come recurrent hours of ardent love, but both will want more than that. We must take our whole selves into marriage, and to have experienced a mere physical attraction is no proof that we shall be able to do it. I remember one very distressed young wife who once asked me for help. She had been carried away by the attraction of a masterful man, and had lived through her engagement and the early days of marriage in a whirl of excitement in which she never stopped to consider what sort of a man he truly was. A month or two after marriage she inevitably began to find out, and was both shocked and repelled. She was longing to have a friend in her husband; but they both felt that a friendship between them was impossible.

I am sure it must mean one of the hardest tasks which life ever sets any of us to keep one's head when under the influence of such an attraction, and perhaps to have to decide not to act at all in consequence of it. To stifle an incipient passion in that way may be a terrific business for some people. But we are queer complex creatures, and we needs must take account of the whole of ourselves if we are to find life.

Of course the converse of all this is also true. A man and a woman may attain to a fine fellowship of mind and find co-operation in many ways congenial, and yet may experience no mutual physical attraction. And if they begin to think of marriage they have indeed a delicate problem before them. Generally, I believe, the further intimacies which come with marriage will awaken physical instinct in both, and when nature has had her way with them a really complete marriage will be attained. But it is not always so. Neither may have the power fully to awaken the other. In some marriages that are fine friendships either the man or the woman is half-conscious of deep-seated longings that have never been satisfied. And if by chance a third person appears with the power fully to awaken the physical nature of either the husband or the wife, a very difficult situation arises. I do not say it is a situation which cannot be handled successfully. I do not believe we need be the victims of passion. But only a fool would deliberately court the possibility of having to face the situation I have described. Wherefore I say again we need to take account of the whole of ourselves if we are to find life.

OUR MORAL STANDARDS

There are at least three moral standards in existence in the English world. There is first the Christian standard, for which men and women are equal, which recognizes the sacredness of personality in every case, and which calls for absolute continence and chastity before marriage and absolute fidelity after it. This is the standard I am concerned to understand and defend.

There is, secondly, the legal standard, for which men and women have not equal rights, but which, in the marriage and divorce laws, accords to woman an inferior position--which takes no cognizance of immorality between unmarried persons unless children result and which, in England as distinguished from Scotland, attaches no penalties to infidelity on the part of a husband.

And then, thirdly, there is the working moral standard of society. I cannot describe it because it differs so greatly in different sections of society. In general it has to be said that it treats lack of chastity among unmarried men as a very venial offence and punishes the same offence in women with very severe social penalties; and it may certainly be said that it has not yet demanded a full recognition by the law of the equality of the sexes in the matter of moral and married rights.

Now the question of the relation of our legal standards to the Christian standard is an exceedingly difficult and yet vitally important one. The hope of enforcing the Christian standard by law has tempted many minds. In our own day many try to make the law of the land enforce the Christian position about divorce. But there are grave difficulties in connection with this course. The Christian attitude and spirit cannot be produced by law. The scope of mere law must always be much more restricted than the scope of the mind of Christ. The Christian mind is not primarily concerned with penalties and does not desire to see penalties attached to the failure to reach the Christian standard in all things. To attach a criminal stigma to all lapses from the Christian way in morals would be disastrous.

What might be expected from the law of the land is, I think, that it should recognize the fundamental equality of men and women, and that, while demanding less, it should at least point towards the Christian standard .

For the rest, the adjustment of legal enactments to the Christian ideal must always be a matter for delicate and vigilant handling.

We are all in great danger in this connection on account of the mysterious force of the herd instinct. We tend to accept what others think just because they think it. We live under the power of convention often without realizing how insincere and hollow convention may be. Wherefore if we are ever to make progress it becomes nothing less than a duty to scrutinize current standards. They may be less than Christian, and if we are ever to make progress it can only come through an honest process of inquiry and revision.

To-day the spirit of inquiry and challenge is definitely demanding the reasons for the Christian standard itself. But I have no complaint to offer on that account. I believe only good can come from it in the end.

I believe the stored wisdom of the ages is embodied in that Christian standard, and that the more we know about sex the more clearly do we perceive that that standard points the way, and the only way, to real happiness for men and women in social relations, and to the attainment of our highest life. But I freely acknowledge the right of the rising generation to demand the reasons for this standard. I propose, therefore, to try to state those reasons on the assumption that I am addressing honest and sincere minds who only want to know the truth. I can only work out the answer bit by bit.

To begin with, "Why is self-abuse wrong?" It comes under the head of incontinence, which the Bible and all serious moral teachers so firmly condemn. But why? Doctors are beginning to say that unless it is excessive it does no particular harm either to the brain or the body. Its victims worry about it--But need they? Here at least the answer is easily found because it is supplied by those, and by all of those, who indulge in the practice. I have never met a man who did not despise himself for it. It invariably leaves a man out of conceit with himself. I have heard men stoutly defending irregular relations with women, but I have never heard this practice defended, even though it is exceedingly common. Robust male sentiment is all against it. And the reason is that, because it is an attempt to satisfy sexual craving in an abnormal way, it always leaves psychic disturbance behind it. It may relieve a physical tension, but it does nothing to satisfy the whole man. It leaves a bad taste in the mind. Both mind and spirit as well as the body enter into true sexual experience. They have no place in this, and by reason of it the inner harmonies of a man's nature are inevitably jangled.

Then, secondly, why are wild oats evil things to sow? Why should we not endorse the shrug of the shoulders with which society treats them? I notice that even women lightly forgive them, and I believe they make a mistake. Forgiveness is indeed always a divine operation, but light forgiveness implies that nothing serious has happened. What then is so serious about licentiousness?

Why must they be condemned? My whole contention is that love and love alone makes physical intimacy pure and right. Why then cannot love sanctify passionate relationships outside marriage? Why should the union of true lovers be held to be impure before marriage and pure after it?

Let me answer the last query first. I do not think the union of true lovers apart from marriage is impure. I believe that such lovers make a very serious mistake--a mistake that may turn out to have been cruel. I believe that society is utterly right in condemning such unions, and that those who really understand will always refuse to enter on them. But impure is not the word to apply to them. They are clean and beautiful compared to the bodily intimacies of those who marry without love. And yet I do not think that even emotionally they can ever be perfect. Sexual intimacy is not the perfect and sacramental thing which it is meant to be unless both parties come to it with free and untroubled minds, feeling that what they do is a right and happy thing. But in the unions of unmarried persons there generally lurks some half-hidden sense of shame. Some part of the being of one or the other really endorses society's standards, and even love cannot dispel the shadows thus created.

It is generally in defense of temporary unions that people question the necessity for marriage vows. But temporary unions cannot be ended happily. If they were entered on without love, they are gross things, as I have already said; and if they were the creation of real love, there is no happy way out of them. The two have been too close to one another to part without tearing apart--leaving ragged and it may be bleeding edges on their personalities. Then again, as I have tried to show already, love is only made perfect when it is allowed to issue in responsibilities and labors. Divorced from them it is a selfish thing. There is a wild and lawless element in passion, which is part of its glory. But that glory is only sweetened and justified for those who let their passion carry them through the whole career of experience to which it summons them.

All this may be accepted as establishing a case for permanent unions as the only legitimate things, but inasmuch as it claims that the demand for permanence lies in the very heart of love itself it may still be asked with some urgency, "Why introduce a marriage ceremony with public vows?" And here I must follow a somewhat different line of thought which may at first sight seem contradictory. In spite of all that I have said, I believe that even ardent lovers are all the better for being bound, because of the wayward element of inconstancy in human nature. Thousands of married persons have never once been conscious of their vows. They have never come near thinking, "We must hold together because we promised," or "We must make the best of things because we are tied together." Thousands have never for a moment wanted to change their condition. But with others it is not so. No men or women are always at their best. Though they may have had moments on the heights when they gladly took each other for better or for worse, there will come other moods when the finer notes of love will not sound in their ears. There will come to all but a few couples hours when they will be irritated and annoyed with one another. And if they were free to do so, they might fling away from each other and so miss after all the best that was to be. For the best is not to be found in those early days when passion flames and dominates, but rather in those later days when two personalities have at last become really fitted to each other and when the daily round of labor is illumined by the lamp of love. And therefore, being what we are, it is a good thing for our own sakes that we should be bound.

Even though the bonds should actually mean pain, it is still good that they should be allowed to bind, though it be only for the sake of the children. Passionate lovers do not think of children, but society must needs put their claims before all others. Probably the historical reason why society came to insist on monogamy and to condemn all irregular unions lay in the fact that it is the inalienable right of a child to be brought up by a father and a mother, and that no society can be strong and finely ordered unless its foundations are laid in family life, wherein men and women co-operate to give the rising generation every possible chance.

I assume that I am addressing honest minds that wish to handle the issues of life sincerely and wisely, and to them I am sure it must be worth pointing out that it can never be right for individuals to order their lives on principles which could not be given a universal application. I can well understand a passionate couple being quite sure that they will hold to one another throughout life, though they be in no way legally tied. I can imagine that many such couples would resent as a profanity the mere suggestion that they could ever want to part. But imagine what society would become if legal ties were abolished. You and your man or woman may be quite sure that you would never part, but you know that thousands would. Couples would set out on the joint life with little thought, and allow the first painful misunderstanding to part them. Many men would shake off their obligations almost as soon as they found they were becoming heavy. Both men and women would pass from one temporary union to another, mutilating their better natures in the process. Thousands of women would be left in helpless loneliness. Tens of thousands of children would go uncared for and neglected. The picture becomes more horrible the more carefully you look into its details. And as you look you begin to see the real value of our moral standard. It is not an instance of the fussiness of Mrs. Grundy. It is not an instance of slave morality imposed upon free people. It is not one of the arbitrary dicta of a tyrannical Church. It is rather the embodiment of the wisdom learnt through ages of varied and often tragic experience. It is an attempt to conserve for each rising generation the possibility of the best in the field of sexual experience. It does point out the way of happy, healthy, and complete life.

NOTE.--It will be said at once at this point by some, "That means the law is wrong in allowing the remarriage of divorced persons, because in that case there is a definite contradiction between the legal and the Christian standards."

I have deliberately excluded a discussion of the problem of divorce from this book because I am concerned with the unalterable truths about sex rather than with the social question of how best unhappy situations arising from sin can be remedied.

But at this point I must say a word. I conceive the Christian position to be "Marriage cannot be broken without sin." And that position the law endorses. It requires proof that in fact a marriage has been broken by sin, before it will sever the legal bonds.

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