between the sexes has paramount claims on our attention. It actually
occupies a foremost place in the thoughts of most persons. It is
constantly handled in the most unrestrained banter on the stage and
in all the provinces of fictitious literature. Almost every
sensational tale reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean
time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more
shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting
openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them
nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity.
The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly
an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining evils
more widely around us. Shall the pulpit, the academic chair, the high
court of the finer literature, alone be dumb? It is the duty of those
clothed with the authority of wisdom and purity to speak in plain
accents of warning and guidance. They are guilty of a wrong, if they
let a mock modesty keep them silent on a matter so deeply imperilling
the most sacred interests of the community.

Yet a word of protest is called for against those exaggerated
sensational statements on this subject, so persistently forced on
public attention by well-meaning but mistaken persons. A tendency has
shown itself of late, in many quarters, to attribute that increase of
sensual vices imagined to mark the age, not to temporary outward
causes, provisional phases of our civilization, but to a growth of
depravity in character, an intrinsic lowering of moral sanctions and
heightening of foul passions in the people. Such a belief I hold to
be both false in its basis and pernicious in its influence. To every
competent student of human nature, history demonstrates a progressive
diminution in the intensity of the physical passions, and a
corresponding increase of moral sensibility and the power of
conscience. The extension of sensual vice at the present time, if it
be a fact, is owing to accidental conditions which will not be
permanent, and is itself very far from being so common or so fearful
as some alarmists think. Those alarmists are doing more hurt than
good by their overdrawn descriptions and excited declamation. They
are fastening a morbid attention on a morbid subject. There is an
innocent ignorance, which, if dangerous in some cases, is, in many
cases, the highest safety. There is a wholesome unconsciousness, a
noble