nsion. That a celibate
life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does
produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.
Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but
small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed
graves of inward foulness. Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold
unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the
unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain
living and clean thinking.

It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on
the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work
the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity
of the evil--often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of
women like a shadow--a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a
sense of their helpless ignorance. I have even met with Christian women
who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on
authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the
existence of an outcast class, no respectable woman would be safe and we
could not insure the purity of the home! So low had the moral
consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of
the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be
found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debasement of
accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own
virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined
bodies and souls of the children of the poor. Truly the dark places of
the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!

What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and
earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and
loose with the moral sense within them--- which is God's voice within
us--but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for
men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is
bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the
hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is God who has
made us--not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and
false necessities; and God has made the man to love the woman and give
himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for
which she was made the blessed "