uman history has daunted some men to the point of inactivity. Yet the
evils have been controlled. Ignorant and fearful people have said, "This
thing is beyond human power; it is useless for us to struggle against
fate." Yet men of vision and of courage have struggled and won. No man of
moral passion and religious purpose can adopt an attitude of passive
submission to the forces of destruction. We can admit no necessary evil,
or the battle of human progress is lost. We ask ourselves soberly,
therefore, how this tremendous outrush of destructive energy may be
controlled. The answer is plain. Men have by the agency of fire itself
constructed the means by which fire is controlled and domesticated; they
have turned disease against itself, and by the agency of antitoxins have
conquered it; they are learning to arouse and organize the fighting spirit
of men against its own most ancient and fearful expression and are
enlisting soldiers of peace in a war against war. Even so the race depends
upon the higher affections for control of the lower, and lust is
controlled by love. I talked once to a young man in college who had given
himself to sexual vice when he had been in high school; until a year
before I spoke with him, he had supposed that virtually all men were and
must be sexually indulgent. For twelve months he had kept himself clean. I
inquired why and how. He replied simply that he had fallen in love with a
young woman and wished to marry her. His former course now seemed to him
shameful and unmanly. Lust yielding to love! In one of his sonnets to the
woman who afterward became his wife, Edmund Spenser says:--

"You frame my thoughts and fashion me within:
You stop my tongue and teach my heart to speak:
You calm the storm that passion did begin:
Strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak."

In our own experience, as far as we have achieved victory in our own
bodies and minds over our baser passions, we have achieved it by the power
of the higher affections. It is a fact of common experience that love
calms the storm that passion did begin. So Spenser's lady strengthened
passion by her charm, but weakened it by her virtue.

Nor is this the only higher affection that, in the practical experience of
men, has controlled and transformed animal passion. Thousands of fully
sexed men have, through the centuries, turned their bodily and mental
energies so fully to devoted service for God and their fellows a