LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [Correspondents are requested to keep their
letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week" paragraphs. Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym.—Ed. TILE SPECTATOR.]
MORALS OF TODAY
[To the Editor of TILE SPECTATOR.] SER,—There is nothing new—as far as I can judge—in the sexual conduct of men and women today, but what is new is that fornication is openly advocated ; whereas 60 years ago nobody defended it in theory : not even those who' practised it. (I don't wish to be rude ; but to call a spade a spade makes for brevity.) Had we not better admit that there is only one argument for it and that is that self-control is often exceedingly painful? The weakness of all talk about self-repression is that it is unscientific because it fails to explain certain stubborn facts ; for instance : (1) that the greater the pain of the struggle, the more we admire the victor ; even those of us who make the pain the excuse for not struggling at all ; (2) that though we cannot help admiring self-control, the moment we frame an excuse for yielding to desire, by talking of self- expression and the like, we open the door to the influx of evils which makes us all shudder to hear of. Permit a few words on these two points.
(1) Many schoolboys go through a terrible ordeal in gaining self-mastery. I remember one who providentially was encouraged to confess his bondage, and was told that he could win the battle if he tried. He broke off the habit there and then, but told his adviser that it was for a time real agony. Now when I recall the change in the boy's expression, the manly open happenings which took the place of a secret despair, I find it difficult to believe that the modern talk about self-repression is not self-deception.
(2) If it be true—as I am sure it is—that the fear of pain is at the bottom of all lax theories, about monogamy, continence, and so forth, let us recognize that the enormous number of homosexualists in the country today are finding justification for unnameable horrors in these specious phrases.
I submit that these two facts, if rightly interpreted, can only be explained on the assumption that we are all of us endowed with a faculty for recognizing an eternal distinction between absolute wrong and absolute right. But if this faculty is to live it must not be choked by wholly secular preoccupations. It is easy to let it gradually die and to judge these awful questions only from the temporal point of view. Let us ask ourselves the preliminary• question : do we really believe that the Divine Thing we used to call Conscience, which tells us that our horror of certain evils often lies too deep for argument, is an outworn hallucination ? Unless we are sure that it is, is it not insanity to disregard it ? Certainly that is so, unless we are also sure that there is no such thing as the Day of Judgement ; but I have never met a human being who professes any such assurance.—I am,
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