(the ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)

there are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. the two words are celibacy and chastity. we define celibacy as the permanent and systematic suppression of love. we define chastity, on the other hand, as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. chastity, as the word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy for love. in that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential of virtues in the young. it is widely taught today, but ineffectively, because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.

the origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. at a certain stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic imagination. to use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual nature. but under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and trample it into the mire. one of the most powerful of these destructive agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. by means of sex he is laid hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their convenience. at the worst they rob him of everything, money, health, time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. in the words of a wise old man of the world, francis bacon, "he who marries and has children gives hostages to fortune." in a world wherein war, pestilence, and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. discovering in himself a deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert, and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips, and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy in himself the impulse of sex.

so the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use, but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex relationship—notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true wisdom and health and happiness in love.

i say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking it down, and she always succeeds. there never has been a celibate religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of loathsome unnatural vices. and sooner or later the ideal begins to weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces" and attractive servant girls. make the acquaintance of any police sergeant in any big city of america, and get him to chatting on friendly terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of celibate religious orders. as one old-timer in the "tenderloin" of new york said to me, "of course, we don't make any trouble for the good fathers." nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an irishman and a catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every barrier that society may set against it.

there is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature. it is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has as its complements the institutions of old maidenhood and of prostitution. both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic, are entirely incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where love is recognized and honored. chastity is a preparation for love; and if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by economic strangling, you at once make chastity a utopian dream. you may preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may call out your billy sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions; you may threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences into spasms—but you will never make them chaste. on the contrary, strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn into sexual excitements before your eyes! so subtle is our ancient mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!

the abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the world. it is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and supposed to be modern forms. take a man like tolstoi, who gained enormous influence, not merely in russia, but throughout the world among people who think themselves liberal—humanitarians, pacifists, philosophic anarchists. tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous manifestation of disease. all through his youth and middle years, as an army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he never got out of his thoughts to his last day. gorky, meeting him in his old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.

but tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral consciences of humanity. he looked about him at a world gone mad with greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit and escape the power of evil. as regards sex, his thought took the form of ancient christian celibacy. man must repudiate the physical side of sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the relationship of brother and sister. in his novel, "resurrection," tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl and conceives for her such a noble and generous emotion; but gradually the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her, and she becomes a prostitute. later in life, when he discovers the crime he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and wins her to god and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he should have maintained from the beginning.

it was tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! here you see the reincarnation of the old christian notion that we are "conceived in sin and born in iniquity." we may be pure and good, and cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. some choose to sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future; and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom god has sent to call down destruction upon a world which he had made—through some mistake never satisfactorily explained!

it is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a perverted view of life; but the truth is that this attitude toward sex is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into most of our laws and social conventions. it is this, which for convenience i will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. that is why i have tried so carefully to draw the distinction between what i call love and what i call lust; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the idea of chastity, which must form an essential part of any regimen of true and enduring love.