ut there will be a tendency for the situation of the
sexes to be, to some extent, changed. "Continence becomes a
counsel rather than a precept, and it is in women that the
voluptuous inclination will be regarded with most indulgence. Man
is made for work; he only meets pleasure in passing; he must be
content that women should occupy themselves with it more than he.
It is men whom it exhausts, and men must always, in part,
restrain their desires."

As, however, we liberate ourselves from the bondage of a compulsory
physical chastity, it becomes possible to rehabilitate chastity as a
virtue. At the present day it can no longer be said that there is on the
part of thinkers and moralists any active hostility to the idea of
chastity; there is, on the contrary, a tendency to recognize the value of
chastity. But this recognition has been accompanied by a return to the
older and sounder conception of chastity. The preservation of a rigid
sexual abstinence, an empty virginity, can only be regarded as a
pseudo-chastity. The only positive virtue which Aristotle could have
recognized in this field was a temperance involving restraint of the lower
impulses, a wise exercise and not a non-exercise.[80] The best thinkers of
the Christian Church adopted the same conception; St. Basil in his
important monastic rules laid no weight on self-discipline as an end in
itself, but regarded it as an instrument for enabling the spirit to gain
power over the flesh. St. Augustine declared that continence is only
excellent when practised in the faith of the highest good,[81] and he
regarded chastity as "an orderly movement of the soul subordinating lower
things to higher things, and specially to be manifested in conjugal
relationships"; Thomas Aquinas, defining chastity in much the same way,
defined impurity as the enjoyment of sexual pleasure not according to
right reason, whether as regards the object or the conditions.[82] But for
a time the voices of the great moralists were unheard. The virtue of
chastity was swamped in the popular Christian passion for the annihilation
of the flesh, and that view was, in the sixteenth century, finally
consecrated by the Council of Trent, which formally pronounced an anathema
upon anyone who should declare that the state of virginity and celibacy
was not better than the state of matrimony. Nowadays the pseudo-chastity
that was of value on the simple ground that any kind of continence