be; partly because we
expend such a wealth of moral energy in directing or misdirecting it,
partly because the sexual impulse normally develops at the same time as
the intellectual impulse, not in the early years of life, when wholesome
instinctive habits might be formed. And there is always some ignorant and
foolish friend who is prepared still further to muddle things: Eat a meal
every other day! Eat twelve meals a day! Never eat fruit! Always eat
grass! The advice emphatically given in sexual matters is usually not less
absurd than this. When, however, the matter is fully open, the problems of
food are not indeed wholly solved, but everyone is enabled by the
experience of his fellows to reach some sort of situation suited to his
own case. And when the rigid secrecy is once swept away a sane and natural
reticence becomes for the first time possible.

This secrecy has not always been maintained. When the Catholic Church was
at the summit of its power and influence it fully realized the magnitude
of sexual problems and took an active and inquiring interest in all the
details of normal and abnormal sexuality. Even to the present time there
are certain phenomena of the sexual life which have scarcely been
accurately described except in ancient theological treatises. As the type
of such treatises I will mention the great tome of Sanchez, _De
Matrimonio_. Here you will find the whole sexual life of men and women
analyzed in its relationships to sin. Everything is set forth, as clearly
and as concisely as it can be--without morbid prudery on the one hand, or
morbid sentimentality on the other--in the coldest scientific language;
the right course of action is pointed out for all the cases that may
occur, and we are told what is lawful, what a venial sin, what a mortal
sin. Now I do not consider that sexual matters concern the theologian
alone, and I deny altogether that he is competent to deal with them. In
his hands, also, undoubtedly, they sometimes become prurient, as they can
scarcely fail to become on the non-natural and unwholesome basis of
asceticism, and as they with difficulty become in the open-air light of
science. But we are bound to recognize the thoroughness with which the
Catholic theologians dealt with these matters, and, from their own point
of view, indeed, the entire reasonableness; we are bound to recognize the
admirable spirit in which, successfully or not, they sought to approach
them. We need to-day the