The honest man, who says he wishes Christianity to be merely practical, and not theoretical or theological, is seldom good at explaining exactly what he means. That is why there is so much mere verbal repetition about what he says. Generally the poor old theologians and theorists have to explain to him what he means. Nevertheless he means something, and it is something like this. A very large number of humane and healthy-minded people nowadays are opportunists; in a sense beyond that in which all sane people are opportunists. We all believe in cutting our coat according to our cloth, in the sense that nobody can cut a coat with no cloth. But if my tailor tells me that all the cloth now in stock is of a bright mustard yellow decorated with scarlet skulls and crossbones, I shall defer as long as possible the use of this for a new dress-coat, and even put myself and the tailor to some trouble to procure cloth of some other kind. 

Now there is a kind of man who will eagerly wear the yellow coat because of the existence of the yellow cloth. He is an opportunist in another sense than mine. There is a difference between the customer who gets what he wants so far as he can and the customer who gets what he doesn't want because he can.

In other words there is a difference between getting what you want, under certain conditions, and allowing the conditions to tell you what to get, and even what you want. Now it is possible to go through life being perpetually played upon by circumstances in this way. If my tennis court is flooded (it seems not improbable at present) I can of course turn it into an ornamental lake. Or I can take the trouble to drain the field and dam the flood and remain faithful to the abstract dogmatic ideal of lawn tennis. If a tree falls on the house and makes a hole in the roof, I can turn the hole into a sky-light and the tree into a fire escape. But if I do not really want a sky-light or a fire escape, I am being dictated to by a tree. And that is an undignified position for a man.

It is the undignified posItion of most modern men. They are opportunists, not merely in the sense of getting what they want in the way that is most practical, but of trying to want the thing that is most practical; that is, merely the thing that is most easy. That is why they cannot understand the basis of Christian idealism in many matters, and especially in the matter of sex. They are always being deflected by the flood or the falling tree, especially that tree of knowledge which is the symbol of the Fall, and which has certainly made a hole in the house, in the sense of the home. But the point here is that these people have a new sexual plan or purpose with every superficial turn of events. Whenever there happen to be more women than men they begin to talk of polygamy. Whenever there are rather more children than is convenient for sweaters to support by decent wages they at once begin to talk of tricks that are a sort of substitute for infanticide.

When those who were afraid of over-population this year are afraid of race suicide next year, they will propound a new philosophy of sex to enforce the most random re-population. When wives and husbands happen to be separated by all our industrial work and business worry, it is easier to propose that they should be divorced by new laws and new moralities. We are already in the happy state in which they work in different offices, so it is easy to reach the happier state in which they live in different homes. Men are divided from their wives and children in a shipwreck, and those opportunists treat our industrial society as one continual shipwreck. There may be a something to be said for that description of it. But the worst of a shipwreck is that the ship so often goes down. 

Now nobody can understand the Christian theory of sex who does not understand this idea of man having a plan which he wishes to impose upon circumstances, instead of waiting for the circumstances to see what his plan is to be. The Christian desires to create the conditions in which Christian marriage is most workable and worthy of itself; not to accept whatever is most workable in very unworthy conditions. Why he wants it, and what it really is, we will consider in a moment; but it is necessary to make clear at the start that it is not something suggested to us by the social conditions around us; it is something suggested to us by God and our common conscience and sense of the general honor of mankind. And that is what our poor friend means when he says that we are not practical; he means that we are not always patching our house and altering our garden to fit a falling log or a shower of rain. 

He means that we have a plan of our house and garden and are always trying to restore and rebuild it according to that plan. We do not propose to tear up our original plan and follow a chapter of accidents; until the house is buried under falling crees and the fields are flooded and all the work of man is washed away. That is what he means by our unpracticality, and he is right. 

Stated in its human terms the plan is substantially this. That love which makes youth beautiful, and is the natural spring of so much song and romance, has for its final aim and issue a creative act, the founding of a family. While it is a creative act like sex that of an artist it is also a collective act like that of a small community. It is, perhaps) the one artistic work in which collaboration is a success and indeed a necessity. It takes two to make a quarrel, especially a lovers' quarrel. It also takes two to make a lovcn' agreement that their love shall be put before their quarrels. But by is not merely the terrible sense, of like all creative In other words the feeding of and watching of definition the agreement of the two concern of the two; but, in a very others. The founding of a family arts, is an awful responsibility. the founding of a family means a family, the training, teaching a family. It is a work for a lifetime, and most married lives are too short for it. This continuity is secured, not by "marriage laws," which our modern plutocracics can pull about as they please, but by a voluntary vow or invocation of God made by both parties, that they will help each other in this work until death. For those who believe in God and also believe in the meaning of words it is final and irrevocable. 

This creative act is in itself a free act. This creative act, like all creative acts, does involve a loss of freedom. The man who has built a housc cannot recover that castle in the air that he made and re-made while he was merely planning the house. in that sense we can say if we like that the man who makes a house makes a prison. There is about every grtat work something final, but it is quite true that this work is felt to have a peculiar sort of finality. The passion of a man in his youth has found its right road and reached its right goal, and though love need not be over, the search for love is over.

By the test of this aim and achievement all the things condemned by the Christian ethics fall into their various degrees of error. To prolong the search in a sentimental fashion, long after it has any relation to the real work of a man, is an error in varying degrees; often it is no more than undignificd and ridiculous; turpe senilis amor. To allow the search to stray in such a fashion as to destroy other homes healthily established is, by this definition, obviously wrong. To cultivate a perversion in the mind which actually removes the desire for the fruitful act is horribly wrong. To purchase the mere sterile pleasure from a sterile class is wrong. To maneuver in some scientific fashion, so as to filch the pleasure without taking the responsibilities of the act, is logically and inherently wrong. It is like swaggering about with a medal without going to the war. 

We believe, wIthout a shadow of doubt or hesitation, that where conditions approximate to this ideal humanity is most happy. Thus is the coming of passion used wIth the least degree of destruction. Thus is the passing away of passion accepted with the least degree of disillusion. A constructivc work of manhood follows naturally on the creative work of youth; passion is given a remarkable chance of perpetuating itself as affection, and the life of man is made whole. There are tragedies in it, as there are equally tragedies outside it. We cannot rid life of tragedy without ridding it of liberty. We cannot control the emotional attitude of others in a condition of sexual anarchy any more than in a condition of domestic loyalty. Love is really too free for the purposes of the free lovers. But where men are trained by tradition to regard this process as normal, and not to expect any other, there is far less likelihood of tragic entanglements than in the love that is called free. If we look at the real lIterature of Bohemian or irresponsible love, we shall find it one continual wail and raving lament over false mistresses and torturing love affairs. 

In short, we do not in the least believe in the greater happiness promised to mankind by the dissolution of life-long loyalties; we do not feel the slIghtest respect for the crude and sentimental rhetoric in which it is recommended to us. But the practical result of our conviction and our confidence is this.; that when people say to us—"Your system is quite unsuited to the modem world," we answer—"If that is so things look rathcr rotten for the poor old modem world." When they say—"Your ideal of marriage may be an ideal, but it cannot be a reality," we say— "It is an ideal in a diseased society, it is a reality in a healthy society. For where it is real it makes society healthy." We do not say perfectly healthy, far we believe in other things besides marriage; as, for instance, in the Fall of Man. But the point is that we want what is practical in the sense that we want to make something, to create Christian famIlies. But they only want what is practicable, in the sense of what is easiest at the moment. 

So much for the general theory of marriage that passion is purified by its own fruitfulness, when that fruitfulness is its dignified and decent aid. It might be put shortly by saying that we would substitute, for the half-truth of love for love's sake, the larger truth of love for life's sake. Love is subject to law because it is subject to life. Love is subject to law because it is subject to life. It is true, not merely in a metaphorical, not even merely in a mystical, but also in a material sense, that it is come that we may have life and that we may have it more abundantly. Of course this does not mean that the love has not its own spiritual value, where honorable accident prevents it from being fruitful. But it does mean that, in a general sense, we may judge the loves of men by another mystical metaphor which is also a material fact—and by their fruits we shall know them. 

So much of the principle is, or was until very lately, common to all who call themselves Christians. There is a pendant to the principle professed by all who call themselves Catholics. It is a more mystical idea; and only Catholics, perhaps, have troubled rationally and philosophically to define it. It is by no means true, however, that only Catholics have felt it. The old pagans groped after it in their visions of Athene and Artemis and the Vestal Virgins: The modern agnostics grope after it in their worship of the innocence of childhood—in Peter Pan or the Child’s Garden of Verses. It is the idea that there is for some a direct happiness even more divine than the divine sacrament of marriage. This is a subject at once too special and too great to be expounded here; but two rather singular facts may be noted about it in conclusion. First, that the modern industrial states are invoking a nightmare of over-population, after having themselves actually destroyed the monastic brotherhoods that were a voluntary and virile limitation of it. In other words, they are rather reluctantly relapsing into birth control after actually suppressing the proof that men are capable of self control. Secondly, if such abstention were really required, this religious tradition could give it a poetic and positive enthusiasm, where all others would make it merely a negative mutilation. Catholics believe in reason, and like to have practical things proved; and at present the need is not proved; but only talked about as if it were, like Darwin and Einstein. But even if it were, they would have a better answer than anybody else; the trumpet of St. Francis and St. Dominic. And good Protestants will at least agree that the answer would be better than the alternative of a sort of secret and silent anarchy, in which the motives are narrowed and the result is void. And by this road were turn to the original and normal theme of the ideal of marriage; and to the main truth about it. A thing so human certainly will not finally disappear amid the accidents of an abnormal society. That society will never be able to judge marriage. Marriage will judge that society; and may possibly condemn it.