But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their children starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation; then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or an assassin with a dagger and club. In other words, sex would become all the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her afterwards. That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our future discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is lust. The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call lust, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as legalized and consecrated lust. We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I assert the proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the impulses of lust; and I say that no man can yield to them without degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but mentally, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the duty of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, to resist the impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.