istic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity had
developed nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sex
instinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, as
we have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in most
instances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more lofty
than the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true of
animals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily the
earliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have with
us but happily in decreasing numbers.

But even among animals we find evidences of something vague,
indefinite, but insistent which leads the animal to exhibit what we
term a tendency toward _selection_; and in the animal also, through
the exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here again
we note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life of
humans, namely, that in some instances what we have called the
maternal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love,
is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals than
with Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of the
evolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in the
family.

If maternal love were confined strictly to the female parent, and the
procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only,
we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent
reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female,
since our capacity grows by becoming diffused.

As the world stands today, parental love takes a higher place in the
life of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on a
larger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and above
even parental love we have been accustomed to place the love of God.

Now we know that there are many who claim that their love of this
abstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we may
tacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear of
the Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths of
the love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something to
which the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is some
perfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flower
into its full possibilities.

And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; more