Formal sexual teaching is mostly limited to single Sunday night, semi religious generalities for men only, at an age when many of them are already disciples of the old code of the harmful sort. It is foolish to expect to shape the complex functions of human deportment without the same apprenticeship which is required for those who weave, and work in wood, or iron, or law, or science. Sexual ethics is treated as an optional, one hour study. In every part of the world one hears the same rotten and hopelessly false ideas which stick in the flesh of men like the poisoned plug darts of the South American Indians. Methodically prevented from holding trustworthy opinions, people repeat their ruinous ideas with parrot like irresponsibility.
This being so, can it be wondered at that an increasing number of physicians and others are getting thoroughly angered at the "unco guid" whose knees quake so easily, and that they refuse to supinely tolerate this pernicious ignorance? Unquestionably we are abundantly justified in asserting that the general run of humanity are falsely educated and under educated in these particulars; that they have a small amount of usable knowledge in systematic form; that they have a multitude of vicious ideas; and that they have a wide desire to enjoy themselves. Lack of knowledge can alone excuse them. But let us hope that it is not an "invincible ignorance", for it is from such material that good conduct must come. Private and public life can be moulded or remoulded into fitness for a civilized state only by gradual and deliberate methods of teaching. Incoherent babble is useless, and those who instruct should have a profound knowledge of the disorder in the world and also of the laws of life.
Those who are ill need little encouragement to seek the best physician they can find, and they are very ready to do certain things and to abstain from other things for the sake of bodily health. It is useless for a physician to give advice to one who does not care for a normal bodily condition. The same is true in the always closely allied department of ethics. Unsolicited proffers of advice are usually inopportune. The moral counsellor will waste his breath in laboring over those who do not profoundly desire to restrain their wanton impulses wherever they can be shown to be wrong. But those who really wish to live rationally, and who feel that they are sick in health, or sick in morals, long for aid and should have it. And if a man is very seriously disordered without being aware of it, it is a kindness to inform him if tact permit.
Life is at best a via dolorosa, but the physically healthy and morally straight man gets along better than the physically diseased and morally disordered man. Here ignorance is not bliss, but folly. Our fighting in this noble cause must be done in the open, and not in ambush; we must have no secrets, and be ready with the love of a brother to encourage and help all who seek for aid. If one can strengthen the heart of the honest inquirer so that he can stem the current of his desires, the work is as brilliant as that of preventive medicine. Everywhere disease and evil melt away before full knowledge. Expurgate the Bible and it would be characterless. Expurgate medicine and it would be a farce; and remove from its congener, ethics, the sexual elements, and it is fit only for the philosophical theorizing of those who delight to dwell in the hazy, moonlit portions of some of the divisions of metaphysics. If the general public could know what the medical profession knows, and what students of morals know, and they are welcome to it all, it is most difficult to believe that there would not be a very general reversal of the adjustments of conduct. The importance of such knowledge can be measured only in terms of human happiness or human misery. A mysterious treatment of the subject stimulates harmfully, while a tactful frankness eliminates the chief sources of danger.
A dominating love for a distant end is alone able to make one persevere in following up all phases of the life of man, for much of it is wholly distasteful except with this in view. But those who have will power are content to traverse hostile stretches, and in such the primary motive subordinates all secondary considerations.
In many fields the expression of opinion to day opens up a dozen questions for tomorrow. But today and always the truth will endure that full personal and social health and happiness is to be found only by ideal and rational conduct, and that the death of human nobility is always imminent wherever and whenever there is divergence from rectitude and a lodgment for vice. The ethical man will not wound the feelings nor strain the friendship of a dog, or other animal, if he can avoid it, and wherever possible will ameliorate conditions of distress. So widely prevalent is the moral weight of this sympathetic feeling that we need not be pessimistic concerning the evolution of humanity to a coming condition of ideal civilization.