Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
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was a danger t o small girls being c ured by int erc ourse wit h a mat ure woman. It is
to be noted that suc h an ac tion would by no means guarantee a c ure for a man in
suc h a c ondition anyway. He quotes the play The Rainmaker, in whic h the
Rainmaker deliberately seduces the farmer’s daughter to save her, as he claimed,
from being ‘spinsterised’. This completely leaves out of account the very real
possibilit y of sublimat ion... There is many an unmarried woman who is very, very
far from being a ‘frustrated spinster’ bec ause she has found fullness of life in some
other outlet. There is many a man who has had to do without marriage and who
has sublimat ed his sex drive into other achievements and other service. One may
spec ulate whether John Wesley would have been suc h a dynamic founder of a new
c hurc h if he had been happily married. He poured into the c hurc h what he might
have kept within the limits of a home. There are cures and c ompensations for
abnormal c onditions whic h do not involve breaking what we have learned to c all the
moral law – and in point of fact these cures are far more effective.
(b) And above all, t he sit uat ionist is liable t o forget quit e simply t he grace of
God. Unless Christ ianit y is a t ot al swindle, t hen it must make good it s c laim t o
make bad men good. To encourage towards permissiveness is no real cure; to
direct to the grace of God is.
...The situationists have taught us that we must indeed be flexible; that we must
indeed look on the problems of others, not with self-righteousness, but with
sympathy; that we must not be legalists; but in spite of that we do well still to
remember that there are laws which we break at our peril.
In the bac kground of our disc ussion of situation ethic s there has always been
the idea of law. Sometimes, in fact, it has almost seemed that the idea of law and
the idea of situation ethic s formed a c ontrast and even an antithesis. I did say at
one point that the situationists seemed to have a phobia of law.
...I have left t o t he end one very import ant view of law. It is a view whic h is largely,
but not quit e universally, ac c ept ed. It is t he view t hat it is always public morals
with whic h the law is c onc erned, and never private morals, unless these private
morals are an offence to public decency or a threat to public welfare. In other
words, these are many things whic h are immoral, but whic h are not illegal. Or, to
put it in another way, there is a wide difference between sin, wit h whic h t he law is
not c onc erned, and c rime, with which the law is deeply concerned. To take the case
of sexual morality, so long as a sexual act is by common consent between two
adults, so long as it c annot be held to have hurt or injured either, and so long as it
is c arried on in a way that does not offend public dec enc y or interfere with public
order, then it is not the c onc ern of the law. This has always been the law in regard
to prostitution in this c ountry. It has never been illegal to have sexual int erc ourse
wit h a prost it ut e. What is illegal is solic it at ion, whic h is an offenc e against public
order. Very recently, the situation has become the same in regard to homosexual
prac t ic es, whic h unt il t hen were illegal as suc h.
...