ssion.

SUCH LOVE HAS A DIRECT TENDENCY

to raise men above the control of their senses. The more of such love
one has and the more it is diffused, the less the liability to sink
into the lower and disorderly loves of the sensual life.

The idea that every attraction, every attachment, every love between
the sexes must lead to marriage--that no love can be tolerated but
with that end in view--is a very false and mischievous one. It
deprives men and women of the strength and happiness they might have
in pure friendships and pure loves, and it leads to a multitude of
false and bad marriages. Two persons are drawn together by strong
attractions and tender sentiments for each other who have no more
right to be married than if they were brother and sister, but who have
the same right to love each other. But their true sentiments for each
other, and consequent relation to each other, are not understood by
those around them and perhaps not by themselves. They are urged by the
misapprehension of others, by their expectation, by ignorant gossip,
by the prejudice of society, based upon low and sensual estimates of
life, to marry; they find that they must either marry or lose the
happiness they have in each other's society, and they make the
irrevocable mistake.

When it is understood that there are

OTHER LOVES

than that of marriage; when the special attraction that justifies
union for life, and the begetting of offspring, is discriminated from
all the other attractions that may bring two souls into very near and
tender relations to each other, there will be more happiness in the
world and fewer incomplete, imperfect, and, therefore, more or less
unhappy, marriages. Nothing can be more detestable than that playing
with fire which goes by the name of

FLIRTATION;

but there are men and women who have the happiness of living and of
being tenderly and devotedly loved by persons of the opposite
sex--loved purely, nobly, happily--without injury and with great good.
When such loves are accompanied by perfect trust in the goodness,
purity, truth, and honor of the beloved, there can be no jealousy, no
desire for selfish absorption, no fear of deprivation of any right.
There is no reason why a husband or a wife should limit the range of
pure and spiritual affection to near relatives.

THE MAN WHO CAN LOVE

a siste