“The Lord God Delight in the Chastity”
No one man, wrote Will and Ariel Durant, “however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”
And then, in discussing the need for moral constraints, the writers observe: “A youth [or an adult, for that matter] boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.” (The Lessons of History, pp. 35-36.)