ce of tradition becomes unduly
pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability.
If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable
and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure
and function--of what is called the traditional with what is called the
ideal--that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its
reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found
this hard to understand. In a vain desire for an impossible logicality
they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals
or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed
to them because of the impressive authority its _dicta_ seem to convey.
The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been
unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions,
so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.

We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with "morality"
in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to
realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting
social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly
affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly
taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral,
what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a
process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand
years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian
Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the
great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question
immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality.
The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little
better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only
regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god. Our sexual
morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable
of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws
that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality
but an immorality.

The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always
taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves,
to reach a stage in which there seems to be an oppos