lives has flown away.

Ecstacy continued, burns up life, and is not intended except for inspiration.

Love may continue with marriage, and it may not. Civilization has drifted us into conditions where it is difficult for romance to continue after the lovers enter into the business of life together.

Marriage is of universal interest. The weal or woe of the race is involved in it.

It is a natural incident in the lives of lovers; but the marriage of lovers, although an incident in love, becomes an event in their lives because of the business partnership, which phase they did not contemplate.

The primal purpose in the marriage of lovers is that they may be perpetually purified, that they may live constantly their best. To do this they must have the Ideal forever before them.

When the business part of marriage shows another “side” of their natures, the Ideal may take wings. Then they naturally feel they are cheated. Their first impulse is to run away from this “trouble,” to get back to the Ideal before it has been effaced.

AN AWAKENING

HE expressions, “falling in love,” and “making love,” are terms suggesting something that is impossible.

No one falls in love. The experience of loving may come when a person has evolved where fine perceptions are possible. All living is an awakening process in which there are many degrees of consciousness. At a certain stage in his evolution, a human being is able to see and feel certain truth.

The imagination is a power which is developed with intellect and fine feeling. The imagination can create a world and people it. In this way, ideals are perpetually made. Humanity’s effort to realize ideals is evolution.

When man can image a human being that fulfils the highest ideal he can create, the soul rejoices. Man forgets the imperfect in his ecstacy when contemplating the perfect. And when one human being sees another human being who reminds him, more or less, of his ideal, he is said to love.

He does not “fall” nor “make,” he realizes, he awakens, and sometimes re-creates.

It may often occur that the person who awakens one to this ideal may recall this ideal once, twice, again and yet again. Or this person may constantly recall it, or cease altogether to recall it.

That man and woman are lovers who constantly keep before each other the Ideal.

They wish to abide together, because together they live their best lives, do their best work, are most kind to their fellow-man, do no wrong, can do no wrong. This is commonly accepted today as the basis of marriage. It is this ideal which is vaguely or definitely in the minds of thinking people when they wish to marry.

The poet Dante had a wonderful, complete ideal. He saw but twice the woman who reminded him of his Perfect. He wrote in poetry of his Ideal and called Her by this woman’s name.

His wife, the mother of his children, was another woman.

Many critics say that Dante’s love for Beatrice was pure. Probably they say this, because he asked nothing of her. That he never knew Beatrice was fortunate, for the two people had very little in common. Dante was a poet and dreamer. Beatrice was a woman of the nobility without serious cares and responsibilities.

THE NATURAL MARRIAGE

Cell seeks affinity with cell.—Reedy.

HEN young people meet on a natural basis our present civilization insists that it must necessarily be followed by a permanent, life-long friendship or disgrace.

The cosmic urge causes a meeting which, if followed by an enforced close relationship, usually has incompatability as a sequence.

Nature has one thing forever in mind. Civilization has not counted on this.

A youth and a maiden meet when passion is strong, the will undisciplined and judgment undeveloped. Convention says there is but one thing to do when young people are thus strongly attracted to each other, and that is to get the sanction of society (church and state) and make arrangements for a permanent intimacy.

The youth expects the perpetual beauty, smile and charm of the ballroom, reception or parlor. The maiden expects protestation of love, and her ideals and promises fulfilled.

Each has firmly fixed in the mind an idea of something that has none or little of the real in it—an idea that is impossible. Yet in it there are hope and fond desire somewhere hinted.

The facts are that a struggle has just begun with some of the unpoetic realities of existence, of which neither has ever before dreamed.

Perhaps the wife must rise early, prepare the breakfast, keep the rooms in order. This is work.

The husband goes to business.

Business perplexes.

“Oh, she is just like other women!”

“Oh, he is just a common man!”

They complain.

The cosmic urge has nothing to do with any of this. It has come—and gone, perhaps.

There is left a social situation. These two young people have had something in common, and possibly only a transitory something.

How shall they live together when she loves what he hates, and he has hopes, ambitions, desires that are nothing to her?

“He has cheated me!” “She has fooled me!” is their heart-cry.

The truth, however, is something like this: “We have been deceived. Nature said one thing to us, and we confused with it something else and thought what society said was true. We have been deceived.”

There was nothing in the first attraction that made these two understand anything about hardships, disagreeable duties, discomforts, weariness, pain.

Those who are anxious to uphold church authority are saying a good deal about the divorce evil. They bring statistics to show that one out of every twelve marriages results in divorce.

They have not, however, secured any statistics as to whether the people in the other eleven marriages enjoy what our Constitution affirms to be the rights of American citizens: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Church is talking about a “cure” for the divorce evil! One bishop earnestly recommends the Jewish anathematization, “Let neither party ever be spoken to