Even a limited study of the prevailing attitude towards sex and reproduction convinces one that back of the greatest sexual problems of our times is the almost universal secrecy, disrespect, vulgarity, and irreverence concerning every aspect of sex and reproduction. Even expectant motherhood is commonly concealed as long as possible, and all reference to the developing new life is usually accompanied with blushes and tones suggestive of some great shame. Nothing sexual is commonly regarded as sacred. Love and marriage, motherhood and birth, are all freely selected as themes for sexual jests, many of them so vulgar that no printed dictionary supplies the necessary words. And I am not simply referring to the great masses of uneducated people, for the saddest fact is that a very large proportion of intelligent people have not an open-minded and respectful attitude concerning sex and reproduction. [Sidenote: Vast change of attitude needed.] Now, unless we can devise some way to counteract the prevailing narrow, vulgar, disrespectful, and irreverent attitude towards all aspects of sex and reproduction; unless we can make people see sexual processes in all their normal aspects as noble, beautiful, and splendid steps in the great plan of nature; unless we can substitute a philosophical and aesthetic view of sex relationship for the time-worn interpretation of everything sexual as inherently vulgar, base, ignoble, and demanding asceticism for those who would reach the highest spiritual development; unless we can begin to make these changes in the prevailing attitude towards sex and reproduction, we cannot make any decided advance in the attempt to help solve sexual problems by special instruction. First of all, sex-education must work for a purified and dignified attitude which sees vulgarity and impurity only when the functions of sex have been voluntarily and knowingly misused and thereby debased. Sex-education must work against the idea that sexual processes are inherently vulgar, degraded, base, and impure. Such an interpretation is correct only when sexual instincts are uncontrolled and thereby out of harmony with the highest ideals of life. But control does not mean asceticism which aims at complete subjugation of sexual instincts and would annihilate them if that were biologically possible. The early Christians, disgusted with the sexual degradation of the paganistic and materialistic Romans, preached a doctrine of sexual asceticism as the ideal for those who would rise to the heights of spiritual life. This pessimistic interpretation of the relation of sex and life has persisted even in some ecclesiastical teachings of the twentieth century, and probably has had not a little responsibility for the widely accepted and depressing view that sex is a necessary but regrettable fact of human life. [Sidenote: Attitude changing.]