even then it may happen that men friends together will talk
of women, and women friends of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong
and altogether sexless glow of those who have fought well together, or
drunk or jested together or hunted a common quarry.

Now it seems to me that the Believer must also be a Lover, that he will
love as much as he can and as many people as he can, and in many moods
and ways. As I have said already, many of those who have taught religion
and morality in the past have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the
intenser personal loves. They have been, to put it by a figure, urgent
upon the road to the ocean. To that they would lead us, though we come
to it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they grudge it that we
should strip and plunge into the wayside stream. But all streams, all
rivers come from this ocean in the beginning, lead to it in the end.

It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it, that it breaks
down the boundaries of self. That love is most perfect which does most
completely merge its lovers. But no love is altogether perfect, and for
most men and women love is no more than a partial and temporary lowering
of the barriers that keep them apart. With many, the attraction of love
seems always to fall short of what I hold to be its end, it draws people
together in the most momentary of self-forgetfulnesses, and for the rest
seems rather to enhance their egotisms and their difference. They are
secret from one another even in their embraces. There is a sort of love
that is egotistical lust almost regardless of its partner, a sort of
love that is mere fleshless pride and vanity at a white heat. There is
the love-making that springs from sheer boredom, like a man reading a
story-book to fill an hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an
agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory of a living possession,
they aim at gratification or excitement or conquest. True love seeks
to be mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but these egotistical
mockeries of love have always resentment in them and hatred in them and
a watchful distrust. Jealousy is the measure of self-love in love.

True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of life, it is not a
universal thing. It is the individualized correlative of Salvation; like
that it is a synthetic consequence of conflicts and confusions. Many
people do not desire or need Salvation, they cannot understand it, much
less achieve it;