The court tends to assume that there is not a problem if willing adults indulge a taste for pornography in a theater whose outside advertising does not offend the squeamish. The assumption is wrong….The attitudes, taste, and moral values inculcated do not stay behind in the theater. A change in moral environment—in social attitudes toward sex, marriage, duties toward children, and the like—may as surely be felt as harm as the possibility of physical violence.

When I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend of mine to an extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays, each occupying about twenty minutes. They were all astonishingly effective; but there was one of them which was so effective that my friend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated by the police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in a wreck or naval disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how they fight each other without object and in a mere hatred of everything. And then there was added, with all that horrible irony which Voltaire began, a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their bodies, saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal embrace. My friend and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived long in Paris, he said, like a Frenchman: "What admirable artistic arrangement! Is it not exquisite?" "No," I replied, assuming as far as possible the traditional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in Punch - "No, it is not exquisite. Perhaps it is unmeaning; if it is unmeaning I do not mind. But if it has a meaning I know what the meaning is; it is that under all their pageant of chivalry men are not only beasts, but even hunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity, especially when humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the human soul, and when it is meant to depress it. I know that Cyrano de Bergerac (where the actors talked even quicker) was meant to encourage man. And I know that this was meant to discourage him."

Consider the great historical fact that for three centuries the Book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John o'Groat's to Land's End; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of a merely literary form, and finally that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical processions fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil?

A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgement, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. This mass of trash, however, is not without some distinction; some few modeling their narratives although fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of a sound morality… For a like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged. Some is useful for forming style and taste. Pope, Dryden, Thompson, Shakespeare, and of the French, Moliere, Racine, the Corneilles, may be read with pleasure and improvement.

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours.

Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

Some of you may feel that this is very unlike your own experience. You may say "I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings." That is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast.

Thus Richard Owen, when the mantle of Cuvier fell on his shoulders, could not rid his mind of supernaturalism and of constant divine interference in the natural order of things; he could not fully accept our modern view that the natural order of things is entirely without divine interference. Owen inherited another cloak which was equally archaic and cumbersome, namely, of German transcendental anatomy, the chief exponent of which was Lorenzo Oken.

Now that we enjoy absolute freedom, if not license, of thought, now that men of all shades of scientific, religious, and philosophic belief may express their opinions without fear or favor, it is very difficult to imagine the state of things which prevailed all over western Europe during what we now perceive to be the dark intellectual ages of the close of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. No one was free either to say what he believe or even to record freely what he observed without incurring a certain amount of social disfavor.

...race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government...Thus conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country, of a true sentiment which is based upon knowledge and the lessons of history rather than upon the sentimentalism which is fostered by ignorance.

There are those who hold the name of Professor Huxley as synonymous with irreverence and atheism. Plato's was so held, and Galileo's, and Descartes's, and Newton's, and Faraday's. There can be no greater mistake. No man has greater reverence for the Bible than Huxley. No one more acquaintance with the text of Scripture. He believes there is definite government of the universe; that pleasures and pains are distributed in accordance with law; and that the certain proportion of evil woven up in the life even of worms will help the man who thinks to bear his own share with courage.