what you do concerns yourself alone;
and you will find that you are violating human nature. It is useless for
you to act wrongly and to affirm that you do it "because human nature is
what it is." When you do so, you are assuming that human nature is _not_
what it is; that is to say you assume that it is purely physical, when, in
fact, it is three-fold--body, soul and spirit. You can see for yourselves,
I think, how this violation of human nature works itself out. For animals
promiscuity is not wrong. When they treat themselves as purely animals
they are basing their moral standard, if I may put it so, on bed-rock; they
_are_ animals, and therefore they behave as animals without violating any
law of their being. As they rise higher in the scale of evolution their
morals become nobler. There are moral standards among the lower animals,
but they remain at a certain level, and rightly so. No animal is harmed by
behaving like an animal, for in doing so he obeys the law of his being; but
if human beings behave as though they were animals, what happens? They find
to their horror that they have let loose upon the world detestable, hideous
and devastating diseases. Do you think that medicine will ever be able
to rid the world of what are called the diseases of immorality as long as
immorality remains? I do not believe it. I know that you can do much for
individual sufferers, though you cannot do one-tenth part of what doctors
thought they were going to be able to do, eight or nine years ago. And, of
course, whatever we can do, we must and ought to do. But we do not reach
the root of the matter by medicine.

No scientist can tell us how small-pox or tuberculosis or rheumatism first
entered the world; but any scientist can tell us that by wrong living,
wrong housing, wrong feeding, we can breed and spread and perpetuate
disease. In other words, we are diseased not because we obey the laws
of our nature but because we violate them: and though we can take the
individual sufferer and (sometimes) cure him, we shall not get rid of the
disease until we have learnt to obey those laws and to live rightly.

In just the same way the diseases of vice, though no one can say how they
first came into the world, continue and flourish, not because of human
nature, but because we violate some law of our own nature in what we do. We
may even cure the individual; we may see a thousand struck and a thousand
guilty escape; the fact remains that these d