Married Love | Page 4

own lives, but which
will place them in a position to use their sacred trust as creators of lives
to come.
It has happened many times in human history that individuals have not
only been able to conquer this natural craving for a mate, but have set
up celibacy as a higher ideal. In its most beautiful expression and
sublimest manifestations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a
world-wide love, in place of the narrower human love of home and
children. Many saints and sages, reformers, and dogmatists have
modeled their lives on this ideal. But such individuals cannot be taken
as the standard of the race, for they are out of its main current: they are
branches which may flower, but never fruit in a bodily form.
In this world our spirits not only permeate matter but find their only
expression through its medium. So long as we are human we must have
bodies, and bodies obey chemical and physiological, as well as spiritual

laws.
If our race as a whole set out to pursue an ideal which must ultimately
eliminate bodies together, it is clear that very soon we should find the
conditions of our environment so altered that we could no longer speak
of the human race.
In the meantime, we are human. We each and all live our lives
according to laws, some of which we have begun to understand, many
of which are completely hidden from us. The most complete human
being is he or she who consciously or unconsciously obeys the
profound physical laws of our being in such a way that the spirit
receives much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible. A
mind or spirit finds its fullest expression thwarted by the misuse or the
gross abuse of the body in which it dwells. By the ignorant or
self-indulgent breaking of fundamental laws, the deepest harmonies are
dislocated. The small-minded ascetic endeavors to grow spiritually by
destroying his physical instincts instead of by using them.
But I would proclaim that we are set in the world so to mold matter that
it may express our spirit; that it is presumption to profess to fight the
immemorial laws of our physical being, and that he who does so loses
unconsciously the finest flux in which wondrous new creations take
their rise.
To use a homely simile -- one might compare two human beings to two
wires through which pass electric currents. Isolated from each other the
electric forces within them pass uninterrupted along their length, but if
these wires come into the right juxtaposition, the force is transmuted,
and a spark, a glow of burning light arises between them. Such is love.
From the body of the loved one's simple, sweetly colored flesh, which
our animal instincts urge us to desire, there springs not only the wonder
of a new bodily life, but also the enlargement of the horizon of human
sympathy and the glow of spiritual understanding which one could
never have attained alone.
Many reading this may feel conscious that they have had physical

union without such spiritual accompaniments, perhaps even without an
accession of ordinary pleasure. If that is so, it can only be because,
consciously or unconsciously, they have broken some of the profound
laws which govern the love of man and woman. Only by learning to
hold a bow correctly can one draw music from a violin. Only by
obedience to the laws of the lower plane can one step up to the plane
above.

THE BROKEN JOY
"What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world? How answer
the dumb appeal for help we so often divine below eyes that laugh?"
--A. E. in The Hero in Man.
DREAMING of happiness, feeling that at last they have each found the
one who will give eternal understanding and tenderness, the young man
and maiden marry.
At first, in the time generally called the honeymoon, the unaccustomed
freedom and the sweetness of the relation often do bring real happiness.
How long does it last? Generally, a far shorter time than is generally
acknowledged.
In the first joy of their union it is hidden from the two young people
that they know little or nothing about the fundamental laws of each
other's being. Much of the sex-attraction (not only among human
beings, but even throughout the whole of the animal world) depends
upon the differences between the two that pair; and probably taking
them all unawares, those very differences which drew them together
now begin to work their undoing. But so long as the first illusion that
each understands the other is supported by the thrilling delight of
ever-fresh discoveries, the sensations lived through are so rapid, and so
joyous that the lovers do not realize that