. 7. Some say that if all were chaste the human species would cease to exist. But does not the church teach that the end of the world is bound to come? And science equally shows that some day man's life upon earth, and earth itself, must cease; why then does the idea that the end of the human species might come as the result of good and righteous living arouse so much indignation ?
8. One scientist figured out that if mankind should double itself once every fifty years, in seven thousand years so many descendants would spring even from one pair of parents that only one twenty-seventh part of them would find space on the globe standing shoulder to shoulder.
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To avoid this, one thing alone is needful, and it is affirmed by all wise teachers, as well as implanted in the heart of man, chastity, striving after more and more chastity.
10. Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
But I say unto you. That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. Matthew, v, 27-28.
These words can mean nothing else but that the doctrine of Christ demands from man that he strive after ob-solute chastity.
"But how can this be?" some may reply. "If you cling to absolute chastity, mankind will cease to exist." But men who speak thus do not consider that pointing to perfection as a goal towards which we must strive, does not mean that we shall reach perfection. It is not given to man to attain perfection in anything. The destiny of man is in striving after perfection.
II.
The Sin of Adultery
1. An unspoilt man is disgusted and ashamed to think or speak of sexual relations. Preserve this feeling. It has not been put in the heart of man without cause. This feeling helps man to abstain from the sin of adultery and to maintain his chastity.
2. People use the same expression when referring to the spiritual love—the love of God and of fellow-man, as they do referring to the carnal love of a man for a woman. This is a grievous error, Th^re is nothing in common be-
tween the two. The first, the spiritual love of God and of fellow-man, is the voice of God, the second—the love between man and woman, is the voice of the animal.
3. The law of God is to love God and your neighbor, that is everybody without distinction. In sexual love man loves an individual woman above all others, and the woman an individual man, and therefore sexual love more than anything else turns man from obeying the law of God.
III.
Misery Caused by Sexual Dissoluteness
1. Until you have destroyed to its very roots your lustful attachment to a woman, your spirit will always be tied to the earthly things as the suckling calf is bound to his mother.
Men caught in the meshes of desire struggle like a hare in a trap. Once enmeshed in lustful passion, they will not free themselves from suffering for a long time.
Buddhist Wisdom.
2. A moth rushes to the flame because it does not realize that it will bum its wings; a fish swallows the worm because it does not know that it means its ruin. But we know that lustful passions will surely entrap and ruin us, and still we yield to them.
3. As the fireflies over a swamp lead men astray into mire, and are lost to view themselves, even so the delights of sexual gratification delude the people. Men go astray, their lives are ruined, and when they come to their senses and look around, that which has ruined their lives is no longer there. Schopenhauer,
IV.
Criminal Attitude of Our Leading Men to the
Sin of Lust
1. In order to realize fully the immortality, the anti-Christian character of the life of Christian people, one need only remember that the status of women living by vice is everywhere sanctioned and regulated.
2. Among rich men there exists a false belief, fostered by a false science, to the effect that sexual intercourse is a condition necessary to health, and as matrimony is not always possible, sexual intercourse without marriage, placing no obligation on man besides payment of money, is something absolutely natural. This conviction is so wide-spread and firm that parents on the advice of physicians lead their children into vice; and institutions whose only reason for existence is to care for the welfare of citizens, permit the maintenance of a caste of women whose bodies and souls must be ruined for the gratification of dissolute males.
3. To argue whether it be good or evil for the health of a man to have sexual intercourse with women, without living with them as man and wife, is like arguing whether it be good or evil for the health of man to drink the blood of other human beings.
V.
Fighting the Sin of Lustfulness
1. As an animal man must fight with other creatures and multiply in order to increase his species; but as a creature endowed with love and reason man must not fight with other creatures, but love them all, and must not multiply, in order to increase his species, but be chaste. The combination of these two opposite inclinations,—the striving to
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fight for sexual gratification, and the striving after love and chastity,—fashions the life of man as it should be lived.
2. What must a pure youth and a pure maiden do when their sexual feelings are awakened? What should guide them? They must keep themselves pure and strive more and more after chastity in thought and desire.
What must a youth and a maiden do who have become subject to temptation and are engrossed with thoughts of love whether indefinite or directed to an individual person?
The same. They must not permit themselves to fall, knowing that submitting to temptation will not set them free from it, but will augment it, and they must still strive more and more after chastity.
What must people do when the struggle proves too much for them and they fall?
They must not look upon their fall as upon a lawful pleasure, as is done now when it is sanctioned in marriage, nor as an act of occasional gratification which may be repeated with others, nor yet as a calamity (in the case of unequal partners and unsanctioned by ceremonial), but they must look upon this first fall as the initiation of an indissoluble marriage.
What must a man and a woman do who have entered matrimony ?
Still the same: they must together strive to free themselves from sexual lusts.
3. The principal weapon in combating lust is the man's realization of his spirituality. A man must only remember what he is in order to see sexual lust for what it is: a degrading animal characteristic.
4. Fighting the lust of sex is imperative. But you must know in advance the full strength of the enemy without beguiling yourself with false hopes of a speedy triumph*
The fight against this foe is bound to be hard. Yet do not lose courage. Let there be falls but do not lose courage. The child learning to walk falls a hundred times, is hurt, weeps and rises to its feet only to fall again, but in the end he learns to walk. It is not the fall that is terrible, it is the attempt to excuse the fall. Terrible is that falsehood which attempts to prove these falls to be something necessary, inevitable, or something beautiful and lofty. What if on the way to freedom from defilement, to perfection, we fall because of weakness and stray from the path, let us still endeavor to follow this path. Do not let us say that the defilement is our fate, do not let us philosophize or burst into poetry in self-justification, let us firmly remember that evil is evil, and that we will not commit it.
Nazhiznn.
5. Struggling against sexual lusts is the most difficult of all combats; there is no age or condition, infancy and hoary age alone excepted, when man is free from it. And the adult man and woman who have not reached senility must be always on guard against the foe who is merely awaiting a favorable opportunity for an attack.