Malthus’s condemnation of such practices was of little avail. Other moralists more indulgent than the master have given them their sanction by endeavouring to show that this is the only way in which men can perform a double function, on the one hand giving full scope to sexual instinct in accordance with the physiological and psychological laws of their being, and on the other taking care not to leave such a supreme duty as that of child-bearing to mere chance and not to impose upon womankind such an exhausting task as that of maternity save when freely and voluntarily undertaken. This is quite contrary to the pastor’s teaching concerning moral restraint. The Neo-Malthusians, on the other hand, consider his teaching very immoral, as being contrary to the laws of physiology, infected with ideas of Christian asceticism, and altogether worse than the evil it seeks to remedy. His rule of enforced celibacy might, in their opinion, involve more suffering even than want of food, and late marriages simply constitute an outrage upon morality by encouraging prostitution and increasing the number of illegitimate births. The Neo-Malthusians[306] persist in regarding themselves as his disciples because they think that he clearly demonstrated, despite himself perhaps, that the exercise of the blind instinct of reproduction must result in the multiplication of human beings who are faced by want and disease and liable to sudden extinction or slow degradation, and that the only way of avoiding this is to check the instinct. There is reason to believe, however, that were Malthus now alive he would not be a Neo-Malthusian. He would not have willingly pardoned his disciples the perpetration of sexual frauds which enable man to be freed from the responsibilities which Nature intended him to bear. Nevertheless we must recognise that the concessions which he made prepared the way for this further development.