Sex and Common-SenseRoyden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Philosophy
Sex and Common-Sense
Royden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Marriage; Sex; Sexual ethics
I would urge, then, for the future, that we should not concentrate all
our moral, ethical, religious, and social force on perpetuating the tragic
failure of an empty marriage, but, rather, should concentrate our efforts
on trying to make people understand what marriage is; what their own
natures are; what marriage is going to demand from them; what they need in
order to make it noble. I urge, moreover, that the same principle should
apply to those who do not marry--that they also should learn in the
light what their difficulties are going to be; how to face their
own temperaments; how to deal with their own minds and bodies. Your
temperament, men and women, does not decide your destiny; it does decide
your trials. To know how to deal with it and how to make it your servant,
how so to enthrone spiritual power in your nature that it shall dominate
all that is physical, not as something base, but as a sacred and a
consecrated thing--it is on this that the teachers of to-day should
concentrate with all their power. It is true that when we have learnt
all that is possible from teaching, there is still something to learn. In
marriage is it possible to know finally until the final step is taken?
No, I do not think so. But when you consider how we have struggled against
ignorance, how many pitfalls have been put in the path of those who
desired knowledge, how we have, as it seems, done our best to make this
relationship a failure, surely it is worth while, at least, to try what
knowledge, and understanding, and education, and training _can_ do. We
cannot know all. That is no reason why we should not know all that we can.
Surely marriage must be a divine institution, since we have done so much
to make it a failure, and yet one sees again and again such splendid love,
such magnificent loyalty and faith! "You advocate," someone wrote to me the
other day, "you advocate that people should leave each other when they are
tired of each other." No, I do not advocate that anyone should accept
a failure. I advocate that every human being should do all that is
possible--more perhaps than is possible without the grace of God--to
make marriage the noble and lovely thing it should be. I think those are
faint-hearted who easily accept the fact that it is difficult, and from
that drift swiftly to the conclusion that for them it is impossible. I
advocate that the greatest faith and loyalty should be practised. I believe
in my heart that there is perhaps no relationship which cannot be redeemed
by the love and devotion and the grace of God in the hearts of those who
seek to make it redeemable. What I do say is that in Church and State we
should concentrate all our efforts on helping men and women to a wise,
enlightened, noble conception of marriage before they enter upon it, and
not on a futile and immoral attempt to hold them together by a mere legal
contract when all that made it valid has fled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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