(The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.) There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two words are celibacy and chastity. We define celibacy as the permanent and systematic suppression of love. We define chastity, on the other hand, as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as the word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy for love. In that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively, because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.
The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By means of sex he is laid hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health, time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence, and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert, and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips, and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy in himself the impulse of sex.
So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use, but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex relationship—notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true wisdom and health and happiness in love.
I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces" and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every barrier that society may set against it.
There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature. It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has as its complements t............