The truth is, of course, that what is needed is not physical exhaustion any more than physical idleness and overfeeding. What is wanted is hard and _interesting_ work--work that absorbs one's mental as well as physical strength. A boy at a public school who really cares for games can pour his energies into them and appear a fine example of the system; a boy who, though games are compulsory, cannot interest himself in them at all, is not helped by being physically exhausted. If, then, he yields to a temptation the other has escaped, this need not be because he is more wicked or more weak. It may quite well be because the insistence on athleticism, which has been elevated into a cult, in our public schools, has supplied a real and absorbing interest for the one, but has merely used the physical capacity of the other without touching his mind or his spirit at all. When shall we learn that every human being is a unity, and that to ignore any part of it--body, mind or spirit--is idiotic? The muscular Christian who believes that continence is achieved by physical fatigue is as short-sighted as he who would treat the whole matter as a purely ethical problem. But the man or woman who works hard at some congenial and absorbing task--especially if it be creative work--finds the virtue of continence well within his grasp without exhaustion and without asceticism. It is because sex is essentially a creative--the creative--power in humanity that we have to direct its force into some more spiritual channel than mere physical labour, if we are to make ourselves its master.