Recent statistics show that, worldwide, unprecedented numbers of teenagers​—even preteens—​are engaging in premarital sex relations.

GREAT BRITAIN: “Only one in six girls leaving her teens is still a virgin and one in four first has sexual intercourse before 16,” a 1980 survey reveals.

CANADA: “An ‘epidemic’ of unwed teen mothers,” says a 1979 government report.

UNITED STATES: ‘Four out of five young men and two out of three young women have had sex by 19,’ a 1981 study indicates.

JAPAN: In some cities ‘unmarried mothers in their late teens and early twenties have registered a sixtyfold increase between 1970 and 1979.’

FRANCE: “More than half of France’s schoolgirls claim to take part in sexual relationships on a regular basis,” a 1980 survey shows.

“Teen Pregnancy Growing World Problem,” says a headline of a recent newspaper article in the Brazil Herald. The article documented such increases in England, Wales, East Germany and Russia. As much as 85 percent of all reported cases of venereal disease occur in young persons. Such diseases have become epidemic worldwide.

Yet not all young persons have taken up the chant “Chaste makes waste.”

Ancient historian Lampridius said of that era that an unmarried person had to have a girl with whom he could have sex relations habitually, “because it was impossible that he could exist without one.” But what helped create such a sordid atmosphere?

‘IF A GOD DOES IT, WHY NOT I?’

The gods of the Romans, for the most part borrowed from the Greeks, were looked to as patterns of behavior. But what immoral characters! Venus and Flora were brazen-faced prostitutes, Bacchus was a drunkard, Mercury was a highway robber and Apollo was a seducer of many women. Even Jupiter, the chief and wisest of the gods, is said to have committed either adultery or incest with 59 women!

How did these examples affect the people? One of the plays during that era portrays a young man contemplating whether he should or should not commit fornication with a beautiful young girl. He then notices a picture of Jupiter seducing a woman. “If a god does it, why should not I, a man?” he reasons, and “so I decided to do it.” This play reflected real life, for Seneca wrote that sexual immorality no longer had any shame for a man “when he saw the gods were no better than himself.”