Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/84

 women claim not only equality, but supremacy?" Only that the family is evolving, and therefore the previous form is disintegrating. The relations between the sexes are searching for a new form, and the old one is falling to pieces. What the new form will be one cannot tell- though much is being outlined. It may be a greater number of people adhering to chastity; it may be temporary conjugal relations which cease at the birth of children, so that both afterwards separate and remain chaste. It may be children educated by society. One cannot see the new forms; but it is certain that new forms are evolving, and that the existence of the old form is possible only when the wife submits to the husband, as it has been everywhere and always, and is yet, where true family life still exists.

Yesterday I was reading Seinkiewicz' Without Dogma. Love to woman is very delicately described, tenderly, with much more niceness than French sensuousness, English hypocrisy, or German pomposity; and I thought "It would be well to write a novel about chaste love... A love which has no possibility of passing into sensuality, and which serves as the best protection against sensuality." Yes, yes, it is so. It is for this that man has been created as man and woman. Only with woman can man lose his chastity, and only with her can he keep it. It would be well to write this...

Man, as an animal, submits to the law of struggle, and to the sexual instinct to reproduce the race. As a rational loving, divine being, he submits to the opposite law, not of struggle with rivals and enemies, but of humility, meekness, and love towards them; and not of sexual instinct, but of chastity.