_Essential Education._—Throughout a large portion of the world, education in sexual matters is the accepted custom. Most of the savage tribes have it. Oriental civilizations still practice it, and are the better for it. Our ancestors, until the birth of Christianity, knew it. The Old Testament lays down frank and open laws upon the subject. But the rites of sexual education had groped so far toward licentiousness, that Christianity, banning the latter, smothered the former. The Christian doctrine, aiming professedly toward cleaner living, taught that the body was worthless, and pointed toward a future life, when only the spirit would count. Since the body was worthless, and since catering to its appetites led to much so-called wrong, it followed that the body, and all that pertained to it, must be vile; only the soul was sacred. Out of this there gradually grew a taboo. Discussion of this vital subject was prohibited. It is this prohibition that has done the greatest harm to the Christian men and women of today. Any sensible person can see that this teaching is worse than false. It, not the body, is vile. Slowly, after nineteen hundred years of a lie, out of the blood of the World War, the truth is springing, phoenix-like. The lie has been the more insidious since men have never practiced it. The pale Galilean light of chastity has wavered like an _ignis fatuus_ over a distant horizon; men, gazing toward it, have stumbled into pitfalls that had otherwise been mountain heights. The joy of the body lived and grew in spite of taboos, but, like a flower doomed to bloom in a cellar, it flourished wanly, and raised its anemic tendrils in the foul blackness of subterfuge. Only within the last decade has man come to see the foulness of this course. Slowly the race is lifting itself out of this slough of deceit. It rests with each parent to see that the rising continues, until the day dawns when every girl and boy will know all of the facts of life, and know them correctly, in all their shining beauty. Then, and then only, will that _ignis fatuus_ fade in the new dawn of a brighter light. It is the silence of the parents that does the most toward making life seem sordid, and brutal. If the parent maintains an obdurate and sanctified silence, as the majority do, will the girl grow into a second Mary? Unfortunately, yes. But science has so far enlightened the race, that we no longer are willing to accept stories of virgin births, and are too apt to see, with cynical eyes, the Angel Gabriel in any of the young men about town. Mothers expect girls to wait for this necessary knowledge until they are married, and then to learn it from the young husband. But all too frequently, the husband is as sadly ignorant as his bride. What then? Will some miracle point the way to happiness? Sadly enough miracles are infrequent. Both young people blunder on, usually into misery.