It is the man and the woman to whom the act remains, each time,
as fresh and beautiful,
as it was the first time, who are able to sustain and perpetuate their first sense
of its glory in the midst
of the sober or bleak or sordid realities
of day to day life, and who can feel, afresh each time, a boundless gratitude for each other and for this blessed
source of sweetness and
strength — it is they who are the truly «virgin», the truly pure and chaste; and (on the Humanist hypothesis) it is they who are the remnant selected by grace to be the true and spiritual seed
of the risen
Christ.33