ciple. Truth is the only thing
that can make us whole--and the first office of Truth, as everyone
knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and
the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the
lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage.

Does the libertine believe in the sacredness of sex? Never. Does the
prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would
not sell herself for money.

Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted
ideals of sex?

If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit.

These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from
love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex
as a human plaything--something which may be called bad one day and
good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near.

Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one
standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now
persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand,
that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been
found?

A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the
woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?

History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded
in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best
that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention
from ourselves.

Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that
a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made
regulations, are not in danger.

Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than
they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval,
should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the
highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high
the price of such devotion.

CHAPTER X

THE PATHWAY OF LOVE

Love is the Great Reality.

Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to
love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of
love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it
is at the same time the only liberating force.

Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a
peop