In the first place, the new thinkers have done precisely what they are always protesting against. They confuse "marriage" with the legal contract. A great part of their abuse, half their plea for the greater sincerity of free love, has no standing against spiritual marriage, founded on true love. Nevertheless the argument against _permanency_ remains. The demand for continual new adventure in emotion (set out to condone both intimacy without marriage or disloyalty to marriage) does rest on something which has the appearance of truth and reason. The fiery, swooning passion of mere bodily impulse _does not last_. But even physical passion, the sex-urge, means more than that. Our new teachers ignore what all experience has proved and science taught—that _every_ physical impulse—whether to eat or drink, work or play—demands restraint for its fruition. The value of self-control is no less of the body than the soul. It is the fever-bred passion, born of stimulated sex-consciousness, that must snatch at every chance for expression and demands constant change. This, indeed, does weary and satiate the spirit, weaken bodily vigour, and destroy manhood. Bid us look for, welcome, and artificially develop every first faint stirring of the sex-urge, and you make us slaves indeed. If you consider less fundamental desires and pleasures of the body, you will admit at once that feverish, uncontrolled, and constant straining to put out all your strength at once, can produce no kind of good sportsman. Who more rigorously disciplines himself than the athlete? The power to be passionate, to express the love of the flesh, dies before it has ever been really attained, for those who always at once yield to mere craving. Their "deeply sensual associations" are "always robbed of mystery and delight when long-balked attraction comes to a tardy blooming." And as Scott told us long ago, "It is no small aggravation of this jaded and uncomfortable state of mind, that the voluptuary cannot renounce the pursuits with which he is satiated, but must continue, for his character's sake, or from the mere force of habit, to take all the toil, fatigue, and danger of the chase, while he has so little real interest in the termination." That is, they quickly lose the very pleasures which were their object and their excuse. _I have known, or read of, no more miserable and weak human beings than many of the men and women in modern fiction._