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AMBASSADOR COLLEGE
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG, Chairman
Publisher of The PLAIN TRUTH Magazine
EXTENSION DEPARTMENT
An educational service at all levels
for all people worldwide
April 9, 1971
Dear Friend and Subscriber:
Several years ago -- in 1964 -- we published and offered free
of charge to subscribers of The PLAIN TRUTH, as an educational
service, a 334-page book on the subject of sex and marriage. It
was a seriously needed book. Never before had there been a book
like it! But the moral revolution has accelerated -- and we feel
a new REVISED EDITION of that book is an imperative NEED!
When my wife and I were married, in 1917, we sorely needed
honest, authoritative information about marriage and sex. It was
then still unlawful to publish, sell or distribute knowledge or
information about sex. I knew only what I had learned from other
boys and young men my age -- with much MISinformation, and much
needed knowledge missing. My wife's mother had died when she was
twelve. Her father taught her only the impression that sex was a
shameful, sinful thing.
Parents generally taught their children nothing. Usually,
they knew little or nothing themselves. Their parents had never
taught them; And besides, it would have been too embarrassing!
The prevailing attitude was: "Keep our children pure and innocent
by ignorance until marriage, and then instinct will tell them what
to do." But instinct did not teach them. Humans, unlike animals,
do not come equipped with instinct. The newborn baby is helpless,
knowing NOTHING at birth. Humans must be TAUGHT, or must learn,
EVERYTHING!
But after World War I, the legal bars prohibiting
dissemination of sex knowledge were knocked down, and moral
standards began also to topple. Around the turn of the century
Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, decided that moral
standards were in need of revision. He attributed neuroses and
mental disturbances to sex repression and ignorance. Through the
centuries, the dualistic attitude of traditional Christianity, that
sex was indecent, shameful and sinful, prevailed. Even in
marriage, except for the purpose of reproduction, sex was viewed as
sinful, even though venial. This attitude imposed restraint and
repression, enforced by IGNORANCE! It rendered countless millions
of marriages frustrated tragedies.
Freud and his followers urged dissemination of knowledge, and
permissive full sexual "freedom" as the panacea. When the legal
bars were removed, following the first World War, a veritable