THE UNIVERSAL SECRET

What is it that everybody knows, and is talking about, and still remains a secret? You don’t know! Well, let me put the question differently. What is it that you discuss with your friend, with your husband, your husband with his friends; girls among themselves, boys among themselves; a respectable man never with a lady; a mother will keep it a secret from her daughter, a father from his son, a teacher from a pupil; something that everybody possesses, yet it is a secret? Well, I will tell you.

It is sex!

Anything pertaining to sex is talked of in whispers in society (for fear the guardian of morality might overhear). It is too vile a subject to be discussed. It is called immoral by church and state, and for that reason you can discuss it with your friends of the same sex behind closed doors, but not of the opposite sex under any condition if you wish to be classed among the respectable. We discussed it at the academy where I was sequestered. We locked the doors and talked about it. Yes, and we did more than that; we—no, I don’t believe I will, until I consult the postmaster-general.

A friend of mine, a little Jew, was telling some stories of the Talmud, among them the ritual of sex. I tolerated it, there being others present. After they had left I told him that if he wanted to tell immoral stories, not to tell them in my house. My friends have told me the same things in a more forceful manner, and I did not think them immoral. The story in itself was not immoral; the immorality consists in that it was told by a person of the opposite sex. The wise by their continuous slander have created a feeling that sex and all its relationship is vile, and is to be dreaded, and is only tolerated as a matter that cannot be helped. How very much nicer, cleaner, and holier it would be if babes could be gotten from the church or government warehouses! How much cleaner and holier we would be were we sexless beings. Some of the wise are even looking for a time when we will evolve to a sexless state. O what a picnic! What a fool God must have been not to know in the first place that he had to wait for some people he made to get wise so they would be able to tell him how to work the game of evolution. But I think that he will not even consider that sexless-state proposition which is being agitated by the wise men. I think that now, like always, he agrees with Rosey, who declares that sex and the use of it is most divine. If there is anything that should be reverenced more than any other thing in the world it is sex. I do not mean motherhood—even the wise have no objection to that. I do not mean womanhood—I mean the organ of sex. The whole universal scheme is sex—it is the holiest of holies.

The use of sex is evolution beginning with protoplasm and on and on until we reach man. Nothing is great that does not contain sex. There is no greatness in art unless sex be there. A painting is not great without it. It is the harmony of music, and poems would be dull without love of some kind. The plumage of the bird and its songs are all for the pleasing of sex. It is the cause of the struggle and happiness of the world.

The miner who spends his life in the mines does so to please a wife, a sweetheart, or his progeny.

The man who goes to war, the man who toils in the shop, he who works on the farm—all are moved by sex. It is divine and holy. Sex is the motive power, from the tiniest amœba to the most complicated organism. The urim and thummim was considered holy. With bare feet and bowed head the high priest approached it. With fear, reverence, and a trembling heart he consulted it, because through it God spake. Words or language that would be adequate for expression there are none; it is only when words fail us, it is only when language would blaspheme, and retard to silence—it is then, and then only, that we can worship the most holy of sanctuaries—sex. Through it God reveals himself.

The earth that possessed us before we were, and whither we shall all of us in due time return, what is it unless it be the sex of the universe. Mother earth we call her, on account of her birth-giving nature. Minus everything attributed to womanhood, she does not nurse us nor possess the breasts of a mother; she is like a mother only in sex. The reception of the seed, the care of it, and the birth of an object is what you see in the earth.

Look everywhere! What do you see? The planting of an acorn and the birth of an oak; the planting of corn seed and the birth of a corn-field. The whole operation is birth and getting ready for birth, and seeing all of this, I feel that there is nothing diviner or more miraculous than sex and the operation of sex. Think of it! A seed planted and when rotten it takes root, and then the birth of a God!

The redemption of the world will be only when sex will be reverenced and honored, and when men and women cease to make traffic of themselves. Then we will not try to put asunder by intellectual rules that which life has joined together by Love.