WAR-TIME MORALS
SIR,—Canon Robins in his survey of war-time morals has only touched upon the main subject which is exercising the mind of the Church today, i.e., sexual morality. He rightly says that the root failure is the absence of a definite standard, and finally, that the real cure of the present situa- tion is a return to a living faith in Christ as the basis of all morality. The difficulty is, that apart from unfaithfulness in marriage, there is no teaching on sex in the Gospels. The problem of the Church is to present any Christian standard to the young and unattached young of today. It is useless merely to tell young people of today that promiscuous inter- course is wrong As we medical men know well, the only preventive is fear, and that fear is not of a religious, but a social solecism.
A good deil of sexual irregularity is caused in war, as Canon Robins indicated, by propinquity, but there is more behind it than that. In the younger girls the trouble is based on curiosity which would not have survived a good grounding in the nature of sex, either from their parents
or at school, and its association with a fuller life and beauty which has its apotheosis in the union of two people who love each other and Christ with all their hearts. There is no doubt that the waste of emotion beforehand prejudices married life, but that may be a social and not necessarily a Christian sentiment. The whole subject needs re-thinking by the Church, perhaps by a group especially selected by the Churches on which medical men are included. For this is a problem not only of
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