marriage and birth, but we assume its presence: we do not bring proof.

Love is spirit, and can not be analyzed nor understood.

The most that man can apprehend of it is to know its absence or its presence. Its most refined manifestations have come to us with the development of intellect.

There are only a few examples of the manifestation of great love in history. So rare are the people capable of its expression that the whole world wonders and in awe has said that the Creator is Love.

And lovers have been set apart as belonging to the Great Mystery and revered in degree as is the Source of Love.

One of the phases of this manifestation in people is the desire to give. The lover withholds nothing from his beloved. There is one desire—to give all. Thus is the mind expanded until it reaches truth never before seen.

Love is the enlightener of the soul. It is the all-seeing eye that discovers the highest possibilities in man. Its eternal desire is to fulfil these.

“I can do no ill, because I could not meet the beloved on terms of equality if there were any stain upon my soul. My hands and my heart must be clean.”

Love’s longing is to be entirely whole, clean and strong.

Love would never deceive. It is kindred only to truth and good.

All of life is sacred to the lover, and all life is sacred to him.

The lover is not so anxious that the beloved shall be perfect, as that she herself, he himself, shall be without blemish. Love purifies the lover. Love makes the lover clean.

There is no such thing as unrequited love, for to have loved is all the compensation there is. The soul asks no more.

There is a sublime dignity in love—a majesty that suggests unlimited power.

To love is an individual experience. The object of the love is only the means to this end of awakening and purification.

When the lover asks aught from the beloved, he has descended from the spiritual estate and begins to haggle and barter. Then it is not love, but becomes something to buy and sell with.

Love radiates from the individual, as rays of light from its source.

When the lover wants to continue the ecstacy of the experience of unselfishness, prolong the forgetfulness of his sordid self, he does what? Just the opposite of what will secure for him this Nirvana! He begins to demand. He asks her to be forever near him, she asks him to forever stay, all in faith, believing that the soul-awakener is a person, when the person has only reminded the soul of an ideal. For a time this person keeps this ideal living before the soul of the lover.

Elbert Hubbard says, “I love you because you love the things I love.” There is a trinity in love. Lovers make the soul to see a similar ideal which both love.

So long as each asks nothing from the other, makes no demand, this ideal may continue to come before the mind, and remain there while the person is present, and return at the thought of the beloved.

THE REVELATION

HE ecstacy of feeling the presence of the ideal may continue for many meetings and partings, until the lovers believe that each is responsible for the beautiful ideal that is theirs.

They arrange to live permanently in each other’s presence.

But this living together has induced a thousand conditions that had nothing whatever to do with the ecstacy of the soul.

Young people do not realize how much economics has to do with every-day living until they are face to face with every-day life.

Earning money, the drudgery in housework, the personal habits of the individuals, intimate tastes and prejudices, are all foreign to the awakening of ideals in the soul. The beloved, who was once an angel, becomes a wife, a weaver, a worker, a plain human being, subject to the shortcomings and ignorance that other human beings have.

And the lover, who is also beloved, becomes a husband, an earner of money, in competition with other workers, subject to irritation, weariness, discouragements, human failings.

The human qualities, the frailties and shortcomings, do not inspire the soul to high ideals. And each looks across the impassable gulf of the breakfast-table and wonders why they “introduced into their lives a spy.”

“Where is the ideal I was to dwell with?”

“Where is the ideal that was to abide with me?”

Their souls are wrenched in anguish.

FACTS

You must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions.—Stevenson.

HE business in marriage requires commonsense about ninety-nine per cent.

There is usually less romance in marriage than in any other relationship of life.

But the general idea concerning marriage is that it is all or nearly all romance.

There is no other business partnership so intimate and complex as that in marriage.

And this partnership is entered into, the legal papers are drawn, witnesses to the transaction are called, and a life agreement is made without thought, discussion or an agreement concerning the business part of this partnership.

Emphasis has been placed only upon the love, the part of the contract which mortals can not control.

The business part of this contract holds the destinies of the contracting parties as no other partnership can. Husband and wife can ruin each other’s fortunes utterly. No outsider can do this.

We would consider two men ridiculous who entered into a business partnership, discussing with each other only the pleasure they anticipated in seeing each other so constantly as they would, working side by side each day.

Imagine one partner saying to the other, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” and slipping upon his finger a little gold ring. Then for the duration of this partnership, the privileged partner giving to him who wears the ring what he is inclined, varying as the joy in each other’s presence waxes or wanes. The idea is silly.

And yet a man and a woman may contract to live together, giving little serious thought to the business part of such living, until they find that mortals can not live on romance, and that the joy of their