I have been the perplexed and sympathetic confidant of a number of people who with dismay and sorrow were finding out that marriage was failing them. In almost all these cases religion had been simply passed by as a thing hardly relevant to real life, and it has been plain beyond all question that the trouble in the sphere of marriage could not be mended till something had happened to the persons concerned--in other words, till they had learnt to seek and use the help of God. And often they know it for themselves. "I think what I really need is God," said one very troubled wife to me a few years ago. But she had begun with a long and moving story about her marriage. She indeed went on to ask how God can be found, and it may be that some of my readers will at once want to ask that question, I cannot attempt to deal with it here and now. The first great step towards finding Him is to realize that we need Him, and so to begin to seek Him. And for the rest I can only add that thousands upon thousands have proved in life the truth of what Jesus claimed when He announced "I am the Way." I have written this book largely because I have with reason and out of experience so great a faith in the possibilities of the love that is consummated in marriage that I would fain testify to others concerning it. But I would none the less like to warn any man or any woman lest he or she should imagine that by human love alone life's problem can be solved. Without God we fail in life, and the bitterest part of the failure for many is that even that beautiful and delicate thing marriage fails with the rest. "We are restless till we rest in Thee," and two restless hearts cannot be happy hearts even though they be joined together in the bonds of love. CHAPTER XII THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS Let me begin this chapter with a query. Is not all the trouble in the modern world over the sexual element in life the evidence of something abnormal and distorted in the very constitution of modern society? Or put differently, would it not turn out that if only men and women were set in just and healthy conditions, given real education and sufficient means of self-expression, the sexual problem would be found very largely to have solved itself? I cannot offer any dogmatic answer to that query, though I have my own conviction that history will one day answer it with an unmistakable affirmative. What we can do even now is to notice that every maladjustment in our present social life tends to increase the amount of failure in true sex morality. All our callousness about social evils revenges itself upon us by confronting us with an increasingly menacing problem in this connection, and all honest service devoted to the increase of social health of any sort is also helping our moral progress.