There must be no conflict between
subjective desire and outward behavior.
To object to these traditional and churchly ideas does not by any means
imply that the doctrine of Birth Control is anti-Christian. On the
contrary, it may be profoundly in accordance with the Sermon on the
Mount. One of the greatest living theologians and most penetrating
students of the problems of civilization is of this opinion. In an
address delivered before the Eugenics Education Society of London,(4)
William Ralph Inge, the Very Reverend Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral,
London, pointed out that the doctrine of Birth Control was to be
interpreted as of the very essence of Christianity.
"We should be ready to give up all our theories," he asserted, "if
science proved that we were on the wrong lines. And we can understand,
though we profoundly disagree with, those who oppose us on the grounds
of authority.... We know where we are with a man who says, `Birth Control
is forbidden by God; we prefer poverty, unemployment, war, the physical,
intellectual and moral degeneration of the people, and a high deathrate
to any interference with the universal command to be fruitful and
multiply'; but we have no patience with those who say that we can have
unrestricted and unregulated propagation without those consequences.
It is a great part of our work to press home to the public mind the
alternative that lies before us. Either rational selection must take the
place of the natural selection which the modern State will not allow to
act, or we must go on deteriorating.
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