But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. The law is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or it may be diseased. As a matter of fact it is, in all too many cases, diseased. If it were not, there would be no disease in the world. How is it possible to have a perfect flower--a healthy, normal and wholesome sprout from a diseased root? The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and the only remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may be done by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy, sacred--the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quite different from saying that people are always right or sacred in their sex-relations. To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution of marriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bring back health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thing that can make us whole--and the first office of Truth, as everyone knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage. Does the libertine believe in the sacredness of sex? Never. Does the prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would not sell herself for money. Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted ideals of sex? If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit. These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex as a human plaything--something which may be called bad one day and good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near. Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand, that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been found? A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody? History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention from ourselves. Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made regulations, are not in danger. Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval, should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high the price of such devotion. CHAPTER X