of the organism, we cannot too often repeat, constitute a mighty source of energy which we can never altogether repress though by wise guidance we may render it an aid not only to personal development and well-being but to the moral betterment of the world.  The attraction of sex, according to a superstition which reaches far back into antiquity, is a baleful comet pointing to destruction, rather than a mighty star to which we may harness our chariot.  It may certainly be either, and which it is likely to become depends largely on our knowledge and our power of self-guidance.

In old days when, as we have seen, tradition, aided by the most fantastic superstitions, insisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole emphasis was placed against passion.  Since knowledge and self-guidance, without which passion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then usually absent, the emphasis was needed, and when Boehme, the old mystic, declared that the art of living is to “harness our fiery energies to the service of the light,” it has recently been even maintained that he was the solitary pioneer of our modern doctrines.  But the ages in which ill-regulated passion exceeded—­ages at least full of vitality and energy—­gave place to a more anaemic society.  To-day the conditions are changed, even reversed.  Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now.  We are in no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the explosive splendour of our social life.  We possess, moreover, knowledge in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly they may sometimes be applied.  It is passion, more passion and fuller, that we need.  The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place these many years is with the dead.  For we know what happens in a world when those who ban passion have triumphed.  When Love is suppressed Hate takes its place.  The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside the orgies of Hate.  When nations that might well worship one another cut one another’s throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased.  If the world is not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to carry on the tasks of Love, to do good even in an evil world.

It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy.  The things that fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed.  The entire intrinsic purification of the soul, it was held by the great Spanish Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes