an expression of the love of the spirit, the perfect final expression, the sacrament of love.  Do not imagine that this is not needed, this effort, and this power, by every human being who desires to be human in his love, and not something less than human.  And to those to whom the need comes in its sternest form, I will not pretend for a moment that it is not hard.  Nay, I will prophesy to you that if you do so choose to serve the world, it will to all of you sometimes seem too hard.  With Christ, with St. Francis, your human nature will sometimes assert itself.  “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man”—­the Servant of Humanity—­has no such joy.  But of whatever life you choose, that is sometimes true.  To the finest spirit in marriage there comes sometimes the thought that, but for this great claim, he might have undertaken some adventure, might have answered some call, which now he cannot answer.  Does that mean that he regrets his choice?  No, not for a moment!  It only means that human nature is so rich and so varied that whatever life you forego will sometimes seem to you the better choice.  You will think, for a moment, that you might have chosen differently.  If that happened to St. Francis, believe me, it will happen to you.  But yet, is it not a heroic path that I point out to you?  Is it not possible that to this generation heroism may be possible in such a way, on such a scale, that you will leave this world nobler in moral stature because of the hardness which you endured, the choice that you made?  Women, to whom this comes home specially at this time, may it not be that you, by taking this way, will become the mothers in spirit of women in a happier generation, on whom will never again be imposed our cramped, stifling, sub-human conception of what women ought to be?  You will show to the world not only that the individual woman of genius may have a value to Humanity beyond her sex, but that every woman has that value.  In solving your own problem, and taking hold of life where most it hurts you, you will end by making a moral standard nobler, a humanity richer and more human, a womanhood freer, greater, more Christlike than it was.  And future generations shall rise up and call you blessed.

III

CONSIDERATION OF OTHER SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE DISPROPORTION OF THE SEXES

       “My spirit’s bark is driven
     Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
     Whose sails were never to the tempest given.”

     Shelley:  “Adonais.”

Let us now move away from that aspect of the moral problem which has concerned us hitherto—­that of the difficulties created by the disproportion of the sexes at this time and in this country—­and consider the problem as it presents itself under more normal conditions.  For even in ages and in countries where there are an equal number of men and women there are difficulties in their relations with one another, and a “moral problem.”