SEX AND FREE LOVE

Evening Star, Issue 20687, 9 January 1931, Page 6

SEX AND FREE LOVE

WRITERS DENOUNCED SUBSTITUTE FOR MARRIAGE. Problems of reunion, sex, marriage, and women’s ministry are discussed m the light of Church of England teachin(,r with reverence and insight by Canon T. Guy Rogers, Chaplain to the King, in his book, ‘The Church and People.’ It is a noteworthy and deeply interesting contribution to thought on a difficult question. The author believes that the bishops are right in the Ninth Resolution of tho Lambeth Conference, in which the functions of eex are described as essentially noble. “ Here at once,” bo says, we get away from the almost intolerable atmosphere of the unrevised Prayer Book, which describes marriage as a ‘ remedy against sin.’ It is the implications of such a phrase -that have warped so much that has been written about sex in tho name of the Christian Church. Sex is good and not evil.”

But ho views with groat concern “ the breakdown of religious sanctions (in sex matters) described by Professor Lippman in Jus ‘ Pi'eface to Morals.’ The .spectacle in Russia of a ‘ philosophic mechanism ’ —which seeks to destroy all allegiance except to the State, and which views man as a machine —side by side with the growth in the United States of a romantic idealisation of sex demanding an emotional life free of all social constraints have compelled world-wide- attention to tho subject.” ” DREARY, FREE LOVE.”

As ho says, the very advocates of unrestraint "have to admit that it is disastrous to the higher side of man; “Even D. H. Lawrence, speaking of Die sex-free Bohemians of to-day, goes on to speak of ‘ tho terrible dreariness and depression of modern Bohemia, and tho inward dreariness and emptiness of so many young people of today.’ Free love is not satisfying, but even if it were (and there nmss bo thousands of cases where for the moment for its sake tho world seems well lost) it stands condemned by tho Cross.”

Ho reviews with irony some of the suggested substitutes for marriage, among them tho nostrums which Ellen Key, Judge Lindsay, Mr Bertrand Russell, Miss Fanny Hurst, and the militant Communists have proposed or ordained. Chesterton’s criticism of Judge Lindsay’s “ companionate marriage ” is the sound one—“ it is not marriage, and will very soon cease to bo companionate.”