A. Herbert Gray

“ While we think and work for reconstruction we would do well to remember that there can be no happy and harmonious life for us till this whole problem has been solved—till we have learnt to enthrone pure love in our midst and by its passionate and cleansing power to subdue the brute and exercise our complete humanity to the glory of God. Love never faileth. It purifies passion and dominates the flesh. If we believe in God we needs must believe in the triumph of love; and that means a divine consummation at last to all our wanderings and struggles in connection with Sex. ”

“ Perhaps the worst consequence of aberrations in thought and conduct is that they make it very very hard to be perfectly happy and unashamed when at last love calls them to enter into the inner chambers of marriage and romance. The shadows that rest at times on that part of marriage even for some very happy lovers are due to the fact that the man (or sometimes the woman) was once involved in something else before that was a little like it, and yet was haunted then by a sense of wrong-doing and so could not have a perfect experience. It is only to the pure that all things are pure. ”

“ We have got to go down into that stony valley of humiliation where men and women face the naked facts before their God, and stop all attempt to hide or to deceive. We have got to stop the sophistries which are so dear to us, and through which we try to put the blame on others, or on circumstance, or on fate. We have got to face the fact that the evil things—whatever they were, either small or great—happened because we were weak—because we put pleasure before duty—because we gave in to lust, or evil suggestion, or a craven longing to please the flesh. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The fact is that the ultimate value of marriage—the thing that makes it good fun, as well as a noble thing—lies in the fact that men and women are so different; that they have not the same powers, and can alternately take the lead in their common life. It is comradeship, and not mere occasional love-making, that they must achieve in order to be permanently happy, and comradeship is a relation in which each must be free to be his or her natural self. ”

“ Even love that once was passionate cannot redeem the life of two people unless there is something there to redeem. Two lifeless and stupid people living together can make of life something duller than either could make alone. If it be part of general wisdom to try to live widely and fully, and to use as much of our natures as is possible, that is surely as true for two people together as it could be for them apart. And to make a marriage into a great thing both parties to it must work to make it wide in its horizons and worthy because of the multitude of its interests. ”

“ If we know the truth about this matter we shall with comparative ease answer most of the questions which arise in connection with sex.
By what divine and mysterious instinct it is that love is awakened I do not know. A man may know and appreciate a score of women, and yet remain in the depths of him essentially unmoved; and then some one woman with no conscious purpose will release some secret spring of life in the depths of his personality, whereby she becomes for him hence forth the center of the world. It may happen that this love comes on the heels of knowledge and grows out of friendship. ”

“ To kneel first together before Him, and then to pass on—to acknowledge His goodness as the author of love, and then to go up on to love's high places, what could be more just to the real facts! I know not with what solemnities those who do not believe in God are going to dignify that hour in life, but to all young men and women who do believe in God, I would like to say with all possible urgency: Be sure you do not take that great step until you can ask God's blessing on the taking of it. Be sure you pause a while to be quiet before Him ere you allow your love to have its final sway over you. ”

“ In many men it is love for an ideal woman that does it. They keep themselves from evil because, though they may never have met her, they believe one day they will, and they want to bring her their best selves without any spot of defilement. In many girls love works in the same redemptive way. And perhaps in both what is really working is a mystic longing after the best that life can hold, and a half-conscious understanding that that best is only for those who preserve unity between body and spirit, and keep the body in bonds until the pure command of love itself summons it to freedom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And then, sixthly, from love that has thus run its natural and ordained course a new life results. Even human love has creative value, and by it the doors are opened into that most sacred world in which a man and a woman succumb together to the power and beauty of an infant, thrill together over its untold charms, and find that little hands are clutching at their hearts with amazing and mystic power. ”

“ We need as a race to escape from an evil past. Our greatest danger in this whole connection is the danger of moral skepticism. "Sex vice has always been common," men say with truth; and then with fatal unreason they add, "and always will be." That way lies sheer disaster. The whole situation calls for faith in man's future—faith in his capacity for purity—faith in love. And that faith is really but a part of any true faith in God.
In the past even Christian people have tried to evade the problem of sex. ”

“ Marriage is not the simple and easy thing which the policy would imply. Mother Nature does not teach young couples all that they need to know. Often they make serious mistakes in the first few days. Often they mishandle and spoil the beautiful relationship on which they have entered to their own disgust and disappointment. Uncounted couples to-day have reason for the bitterness with which they complain that nobody ever taught or helped them. In fact the policy of silence is as cruel as its assumptions are untrue. Ignorance is an impossibility for the young. ”

“ At this point in life, further, the instinct for independence becomes often exceedingly strong. All the conventions of society and the received rules for conduct are apt to appear mere tyrannous annoyances, cramping the free expression of personality. Society itself seems rather like a monster threatening to absorb and confine us. To be compelled to consider others, and even to bow to authority, is to many very bitter. ”

“ And it is in view of these things that married love is found to have redeeming power. It is one of the lies of the cynic that love must needs burn itself out somewhere about the forties. Thousands of people have found at forty that the best was yet to be. For the fact is that all through the afternoon of life and even when the shadows lengthen towards the end love will still send beams of beauty and romance into daily life, and remaining still passionate will put golden content into the passing hours. ”

“ I do it all on the basis of one assumption, namely, that a God of love in designing our human nature cannot have put into it anything which is incapable of a pure and happy exercise; and in particular that in making the sex interest so central, permanent, and powerful in human beings He must have had some great and beautiful purpose. I start, in fact, with the faith that the sexual elements in our humanity, once rightly understood and finely handled, make for the enrichment of human life, for the increase of our health and efficiency, and the heightening of our joy. ”

“ And His way is always and altogether the way of love—love that can tame the brute in us and make it a servant—love that can transform passion into a holy fire—love that makes men patient and women generous—that takes the common things of life and makes them sacred— and above all love that can hate sin with fierce sincerity, and yet love and forgive sinners. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I cannot but remember that the mere word will for many good people produce a sensation of distaste. Partly because they have a sincere passion for purity, and partly because this whole subject has been defiled for them by the excesses and indecencies of mankind, they doubt whether it can be right or useful to think about it at all. They regard the facts of sex with a mixture of fear, perplexity, and shame, and take themselves to task if still some curiosity about them lingers in their minds. ”

“ I do not recognize any problem in those cases where marriage has not been based upon love. When a man or a woman marries for financial reasons, or out of a desire for a certain place in society, or because of a mere desire to settle down in life, then he or she runs an enormous risk, and there is nothing to be surprised at if trouble follows. So close an intimacy as marriage involves is really only tolerable when love constantly supplies reasons for patience, generosity and forgiveness. ”

“ Men and women alike make shipwreck of their lives in that way every year.
But there is another way. Our real life is life in God, and the way into it is always the way of surrender. To say with utter sincerity and absence of self-will, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" is to begin to find deliverance at once. We could not and should not surrender thus to anybody else. He alone perfectly understands. But when we have put ourselves into His hands without reserve, immediately life begins to arrange itself. With such surrender there comes a peace which nothing else can bring. ”

“ When I consider all the forces which I have thus briefly reviewed, and remember that behind them there is the power of a central and universal human instinct, I no longer wonder that sexual follies abound in our country, and that we have not yet solved the problem of purity. What I do wonder at is that there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who, in spite of all these facts, insist on living clean and pure lives. There is something in human nature that fights very hard for the true way of life. ”

“ And I know that the pain of such situations is so intense that I would fain speak of them only with consideration and sympathy.
But none the less the broad fact has to be stated that in such cases it is not marriage that has failed but the people involved in marriage. There is nothing in the whole of life so beautiful or so holy but that it can be spoilt when mishandled, and love is no exception to this. I believe love is always felt as a call to unselfishness, but it is a call that can be resisted. ”

“ 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. ”