Introduction

If ever the Western world needed a book, it needs this one now! In no area of human life has there been such drastic social change as in that of SEX. The so-called “New Morality,” first unleashed by World War I, intensified by World War II, completely KO’d Western civilization during the decades of the fifties, sixties and seventies.

Prior to the first World War, it was illegal in the United States to publish, sell or distribute a book of instruction on the subject of sex. After World War I an avalanche of books, pamphlets, magazine and newspaper articles, teachings on sex, descended on the public. Yet in all this, the most vitally needed dimension of knowledge was missing.

During the fifties, sixties, seventies and into the eighties, sex has been hurled at the public in every manner – in movies, in television, in all advertising, in TV commercials. Everywhere sex came to be freely talked about. Morals relaxed. The “New Morality” became accepted by society. Divorces escalated. Family and home life became almost nonexistent – yet a solid family structure is the very foundation of a stable and enduring society.

There has floated abroad the delusion that whatever is new and different is “more progressive” and “modern,” and therefore better. Far more often it is retrogression! The purposes and true meaning of both sex and marriage are extremely vital to know. Physical details can be rightly understood only in the light of what has gone before in this volume. This astonishing knowledge especially as presented in the earlier and middle chapters of this book – is as vital as it is surprising. It is important to read this book in its rightful order, beginning with Chapter 1.

Regardless of how much knowledge the reader may have acquired on the subject, he will find much that is new to him in this book – and he will come to see this entire subject in an entirely new light. The impetus which started research and gathering of material for this book in 1949, was the need to produce our own textbook for the Principles of Living course in Ambassador College. However, the accelerating demand from the constantly enlarging readership of “The Plain Truth”, now nearly three million subscribers in all parts of the world, necessitated preparation of a work for the instruction of this vast number of people, in all walks of life, and in all levels of education.

Purposely therefore, we have avoided the staid dry pedantic professorial language of scholarship which seems typical of the average university-level textbook. Such writing may inflate the intellectual vanity of the author. But it is our purpose to convey knowledge to the reader. The purpose of words is to convey meaning. We have tried to make this text as plain and understandable as it is frank. We have endeavored to make it easy to read.

This work has been produced out of genuine concern and deep compassion for a humanity robbed by false teachings, as well as by ignorance, of the joys, the delights and the rich blessings which have been made possible. But these may be OURS today, if only we will open our minds to receive what has been missing until now. Read and reread it, from beginning to end, with a clean heart, a right spirit and an understanding mind! – and you will be richly rewarded.

The world has emerged from the age of hush! A moral revolution has swept the world! Few under thirty have any conception of what the previous 4,000-year-long world was like. Few over thirty are aware of the extent to which the “New Morality” has progressed – in reverse!

Little was known about sex. The subject was never discussed. It was unlawful in the United States to publish, sell or distribute any knowledge about sex or teaching in its use. Certainly young married people sorely needed proper information. After World War I the legal dam was removed. The floodgates against published sex information opened. An avalanche of books, magazine and newspaper articles flooded over the United States like a tidal wave. One can hardly pick up a magazine on a newsstand that does not feature at least one article on sex.

The medical doctors, the gynecologists, the psycho-analysts, the “sexologists,” ground out “authoritative” books conveying information and teaching on the subject of sex. Yet in all this dissemination the MOST ESSENTIAL DIMENSION OF KNOWLEDGE WAS MISSING! It has remained for this present volume to reveal that all-important dimension, its real meaning and purposes.

This missing dimension in knowledge has not been revealed by religion, by the medical fraternity, by the “authorities” on the subject nor by higher education. You will find it only in this book. Do NOT GLANCE OVER and past that portion of this book. It is a million times more valuable than the technical-physical knowledge. The latter without the former can be, ultimately disastrously fatal! For this is in true fact, the most important and necessary book ever published on sex!

Today we live in a different world. Sex is everywhere discussed, and almost as promiscuously indulged. But the new “freedom” is by no means limited to the sexual response! The modern plunge has dived much deeper than even a modern society is aware! First, take a swift overview of “progress” from our vantage point in the 80’s! Then a surprised (to those of thirty and below) glance back into the pre-World War years as it had been for some 4,000 years! Our camera zooms now into the Western world before and after – two divergent human societies!

The contrast ought to arouse the reader to sober thought! – but will it? Or have we become too lukewarm to be concerned? Our own future and eternity hangs in the balance! Today’s condition and trend is so frightening in what it portends, it ought to shock every individual out of complacency into desperate action to reverse the ominous tide!

But the FACTS OF LIFE as we speed through the eighties have not hit us SUDDENLY in a twenty-four-hour day or a single week! The deadly contrast is not so apparent – because it came on us gradually over a period of six decades – two full generations. The “New Morality” world was spawned after the turn of the century. It developed from the embryo stage during World War I. It surged, mostly among teens unnoticed by their parents on past World War II. The emergence of television after that war gave the trend great impetus. Acceleration sped the downward plunge. The “New Morality” really surfaced during the sixties, blossomed into full bloom in the seventies.

Where are we NOW – after a year into the eighties? In the United States ONE MILLION TEENAGE GIRLS, UNMARRIED, GET PREGNANT EVERY YEAR! Conditions in England, Sweden and Western Europe rival this. Two Johns Hopkins University professors, Melvin Zelnik and John F. Kantner, in a very recent study, report that 50 percent of the nation’s teenage girls – age 14 to 19 – have had premarital sex. The survey showed the percentage has significantly increased since 1971!

Today, with the avalanche of sex literature and sex education published since World War I and with sex everywhere freely discussed, the teens are indeed “wise” in sexual discussion and sexual experience, but still woefully IGNORANT in sex knowledge. Syracuse University Professor Sol Gordon says fewer than 10 percent of all teenagers have been given any school sex education. And of course they receive little or none from their parents. The gutter-knowledge acquired from their peers is woefully inadequate. Yet they are “wise in their own conceits.” Like the boy whose father in agitated embarrassment said, “Johnnie, I think it’s time we had a talk about sex.” “Fine, Dad,” came the answer. “What’d you like to know?”

Sex ignorance is testified by the fact of 250,000 reported adolescent gonorrhea cases annually. Not long ago a third of marriages in the United States resulted in divorce. Today the divorce rate has swelled to one half of all marriages! The foundational bulwark of any healthy, stable and permanent society is the FAMILY UNIT.

Before World War I it was a rare married woman who worked away from home. I remember, during World War I, my own surprise at seeing women employed for the first time as elevator operators in the Marshall Field store in Chicago! Such jobs never had been for women! Today only 13 percent of U.S. families include a working father, home-making mother and one or more children! What would an Abraham Lincoln think of that! Or even a Theodore Roosevelt! Or a Woodrow Wilson! Would they not turn over in their graves – if they knew?

Over two-and-one-half million American men and women avoid marriage altogether – yet live together, either as unmarried heterosexuals or as homosexuals. By 1990 a virgin standing at the marriage altar will be a phenomenon. Many ask today, why marriage at all anyway? Some “experts” say marriage will soon be a thing of the past. There is today a definite conspiracy, active on television, in newspapers and in universities, to do away with the institution of marriage.

Though most people in the eighties will marry at least once, there will be a broad variety of options. This will include living alone by choice – though by no means will it preclude sex. It will include single parentage by women, unmarried twosomes – both homosexual and heterosexual. It will include communal living and unrelated families. The number of unmarried couples living together doubled in the 70’s! Today “authorities” say “change in partnership may be seen as predictable, understandable, even desirable. We’ll back away from the notion of lifelong marriage.”

Loosening attitudes toward sex, shout the “expert” conspirators, will help propel these changes. With legalized abortion, and improved contraception, coming on the eighties horizon are an anti-pregnancy vaccine, birth control implants under the skin, and a birth control pill for men! Sex will be equated with fun, pleasure, enjoyment – not babies! Since it is a basic truism that a solid family structure is the foundational bulwark of any stable and permanent society, this fact means only one thing – CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT IS ON THE WAY DOWN – AND OUT – unless that great “Unseen Strong Hand from Someplace” soon intervenes and saves today’s sick society.

But before we leave the world scene of the eighties, bear in mind the present WORLD IN REVOLT is in rebellion against much more than pre-20th century sex repression. And the modern downward spiral of humanity involves a much wider area than sex alone. Today the family structure of Western life is endangered by much more than illicit and promiscuous sex. Along with the modern sex rampage of adolescents has come other addictions that titillate, arouse, stimulate and please the physical senses.

Accompanying sexual indulgence has come, in teen life, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, modern X-rated movies, gangsterism, violence. They look for every pleasing, stimulating sensation. Some appeal to the sense of feel. Some to sight. Some to hearing – like rock and disco music with the sensual beat and the rhythm. Some to the sense of smell. People smell tobacco smoke. Cigarette ads speak only of “taste.” But you cannot taste smoke! Believe it or not, you cannot taste smoke! But as the smell of tobacco smoke becomes addictive in the nostril, and affects body and mind in the lungs, so “pot” (marijuana), opium and other smoke affects the MIND, and stimulates. One gets “high” – experiences new sensations. Heroin and other hard drugs even more so. Nearly all who become hooked on the hard drugs started on marijuana.

The movies bring “pleasures” through the sense of sight and of sound. Kids spend hours a day before the “one-eyed monster.” It provides a ready-made daydream. And misuse not only dulls the mind, television has been a prime medium by which the anti-family conspiracy has injected its deadly poison into juvenile and adult minds.

Make no mistake. Television is an industry devoted to ENTERTAINMENT – pure and simple! Of course one finds occasionally on TV a truly educational and/or worthwhile program or documentary. But TV is a BUSINESS for PROFIT in America. It provides ENTERTAINMENT so that people have “commercials” selling goods and services thrust before them. The entertainers – even news announcers who are themselves primarily entertainers – say before a “commercial break,” “Stay tuned,” or “We’ll be right back – don’t go away.” The viewer is literally forced to allow the commercial huckster to inject his sales pitch into the mind.

Another modern evil – seldom recognized as such – is the working wife and mother. Family life has undergone a RADICAL REVOLUTION! Teens have sex games at home in bed while Dad and Mom are at work. Children do not eat with parents. They seldom go to movies with parents. Parents have their lives, associates and friends apart from the children. Parents never think of teaching children, being with children, maintaining a FAMILY RELATIONSHIP! Parental responsibility is totally neglected. In due time parents are going to be brought to account for this neglect of basic responsibility.

The young people of today have little awareness of the sex and family conditions in pre-war years. In fact, until 1914 there had been little basic change for some 4,000 years! The prior to 1914 years were as different from today’s world as day is from night! Parents then, even as now, taught their children nothing about sex. They themselves knew nothing! Their parents never had taught them! Besides, it would have been too embarrassing! The commonly accepted dictum was, “Keep our children innocent through ignorance until marriage – then instinct will teach them.”

But instinct did not teach them. Humans unlike animals, do not come equipped with instinct. Blindly, with a smattering of gutter-acquired misknowledge, the newly married blundered their way into disillusionments, shattered dreams, bitter resentments and frustrations – and too often the divorce courts, although divorces were still a rarity.

True, a very large percentage of girls were kept “pure.” The girl, up until 1914, who lost her virginity unmarried had also “lost her honor.” Of course a double standard had developed. Every man wanted a virgin for a wife, but a majority were less careful about male virtue. Yet the girl who had “gone the limit” was “damaged goods.”

Those under thirty today know little about prevailing attitudes and sexual behavior prior to the two world wars. Contrariwise, if a girl who died at age 22 prior to 1917 were resurrected suddenly back to life today, she would be appalled! – horrified! – at the prevailing attitude and behavior of 22-year-old girls today!

Just what are the generally unrealized FACTS? What was the real origin of the then traditional Christian morality? And conversely, what triggered the moral revolution – the so-called “New Morality”? How did TODAY’S moderns come to accept present attitudes and behavior patterns? What has finally, after thousands of years of the “sex-is-shameful” repression, plunged the world into prevalent sexual “freedoms”?

And what after all, is the PLAIN TRUTH? What after all, are the TRUE VALUES? Was the pre-World War concept better for humanity? Is the present “New Morality” really advancement – really better for those who are swept along with it?

People who lived prior to the 20th century would be aghast if they could see life as it is lived today. Up until World War I people believed in marriage and family life. My own family was typical. I had never known of a divorce or a broken home and family in any of my relatives or ancestors. Marriage was “until death do us part.” Any other status or life-style would have been strange and shocking. But what brought this drastic change?