On the other hand, the growth in men of the mental element in sexual passion, from mighty wifely love, often comes like a revelation to the husband. The dying words of a man to the wife who, sending away children, friends, every distraction, had bent the whole force of her passionate nature to holding the beloved object in life--‘I never knew before what love meant’--indicates the revelation which the higher element of sexual passion should bring to the lower phase. It is an illustration of the parallelism and natural harmony between the sexes. The prevalent fallacy that sexual passion is the almost exclusive attribute of men, and attached exclusively to the act of coition--a fallacy which exercises so disastrous an effect upon our social arrangements--arises from ignorance of the distinctive character of human sex--viz., its powerful mental element. A tortured girl, done to death by brutal soldiers, may possess a stronger power of human sexual passion than her destroyers. The comparison so often drawn between the physical development of the comparatively small class of refined and guarded women, and the men of worldly experience whom they marry, is a false comparison. These women have been taught to regard sexual passion as lust and as sin--a sin which it would be a shame for a pure woman to feel, and which she would die rather than confess. She has not been taught that sexual passion is love, even more than lust, and that its ennobling work in humanity is to educate and transfigure the lower by the higher element. The growth and indications of her own nature she is taught to condemn, instead of to respect them as foreshadowing that mighty impulse towards maternity which will place her nearest to the Creator if reverently accepted. But if the comparison be made between men and women of loose lives--not women who are allowed and encouraged by money to carry on a trade in vice, but men and women of similar unrestrained and loose life--the unbridled impulse of physical lust is as remarkable in the latter as in the former. The astounding lust and cruelty of women uncontrolled by spiritual principle is a historical fact. The most destructive phase of fornication is promiscuous intercourse. This riotous debauchery introduced the devastating scourge of syphilis into Western Europe in the fourteenth century. Promiscuous intercourse can never be made ‘safe.’ The resort of many men to one woman, with its results, is against nature. The special structures of the female body, which are endowed with the elasticity necessary for the passage of a child, rich in secreting glands, in folds, in power of absorption, cannot be treated as a plane surface, to be washed out and labelled ‘safe.’ Physical danger will always be connected with unnatural use of the body; neither party engaged in promiscuous intercourse can be pronounced clean.