ADVERTISING a new book, The Ethics of Sex, by German Theologian Helmut Thielicke, the publishers Harper & Row call it "a new approach to the subject the whole nation is discussing." TIME'S Jan. 24 cover story--which drew on Thielicke's thought--quite obviously stimulated and sharpened that discussion. The story not only brought us a greater volume of mail than any other article we ever printed--this week's Letters column presents a second large installment of that mail--but it is being talked about in newspapers, on the air, at formal and informal campus conferences, and in the pulpit. Comment ranged from the 9th Annual Layman's Leadership Institute in Houston to the satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was to a good-humored cartoon by Bill Mauldin portraying an unusually precocious reader of the article--which of course was addressed to a considerably older age group.

By no means has all the comment been favorable. It could not have been, given a topic which is sacred to many, embarrassing to some, and intensely personal to everyone. But we are heartened by the objections almost as much as by the praise, for it is indifference that hurts most in morals as much as in journalism. One reason why TIME undertook this story was precisely because so many Americans in recent times have seemed morally indifferent and unshockable; to judge from the response, there are still a great many who are neither.

True, some of our readers plainly felt that they had not been shocked enough and that the story did not tell them anything new. They meant by this either that we did not give them enough clinical detail (but in that respect, sex never changes very much), or that the situation today is no different from what it always was (but in that respect the critics are perhaps not quite so sophisticated as they think they are).

The more typical complaint was that such matters do not belong in TIME. We believe that TIME must reflect existence as it really is. Our cover painting was indeed provocative, to match a provocative subject. We could have chosen an abstract symbol or a work by a long-dead master; but TIME was interested not in symbolism but in reality, not in the past but in the present. And so with the story itself. The majority of our readers seem to have appreciated the usefulness of bringing together in one article the evidence of the present crisis in values, which threatens not this or that code but the survival of any code at all. And they also seem to have recognized that, if we took sides, we did so against fluid, "relative" ethics and against moral indifference about sex.

Among the many clergymen who quoted the story in sermons is Dr. David Read, pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, who cited what he called that "very full and factual report of the revolution in sexual morality in this country" to underline his own thoughts. Said Dr. Read:

"The Christian call to make a mark, to take a stand, to be counted in the struggle against evil, is not an invitation to put the clock back to Victorian days. It does not mean that we are to become rigid and aggressive moralists with a strict and firm answer to every ethical problem. But it does mean that we are committed to the conviction that there is an answer to be found. We may not always know what is right and what is wrong, but we are to live by the belief that right and wrong are words with power and meaning derived from God himself, and not just labels for the state of our feelings."

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