The one salient motive for the
opposition of ancient codes to sex license was the necessity of
preserving the virility of the young men for war. Today athletes are
enjoined to chastity. But, indeed, if a man would succeed in anything,
he must check this so easily overdeveloped impulse. Promiscuity means
a continually renewed stimulus; the passion, which quickly becomes
normal and intermittent when it spends itself upon one object, is apt
to become an abnormal and almost continuous craving when it is solicited
by a succession of novel and piquant attractions. The advocates of
free love assert that it is unnatural repression that creates an undue
and morbid longing; that freedom to satisfy the instinct would tend
to keep it in its properly subordinate place. But the contrary is,
in reality, true. More usually, as Rabelais has it, "the appetite comes
during the eating." The absence of temptation will leave an instinct
dormant which free opportunity to indulge will develop into a dominant
appetite. And nothing more quickly drafts strength or ambition than
absorption in sex pleasures; we need to put our energies into something
that instead of being inimical is forwarding to the rest of our
interests.
(6) Sexual intemperance coarsens, blunts delight in the
less violent and more delicate emotions. The pleasures of sex,
though of the keenest, are not lasting, like those of the intellect,
of religion, art, and manly achievement.
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