is sin against the community might eventually even equal the stigma
attached nowadays to the awful crime of cheating at cards!

Inspired by the ideal of noble parenthood, maidens would look for the
father's heart in their lovers; men would seek the beautiful maternal
qualities in the girls they were wooing, and the material considerations
that now so largely influence both would obtain less and less. The bond
of marriage would be strengthened a hundredfold. Infidelity would be
rarer, for the husband and wife who had been blessed with children would
feel that their union had been dignified, made truly indissoluble. The
father and mother who had embraced for the first time over the form of
their first-born could never forget that ineffable moment. The man and
woman who had shared a baby between them, taught it to talk and to play
and guided its first faltering steps, could never lightly set aside the
vows that bound them. The soft hands of little children were made to
link men and women's hearts together, and wonderfully they fulfil the
task!

'Only when we become fathers and mothers do we realise all that our
fathers and mothers have done for us'--and what a revelation it is! What
a new heaven and a new earth are opened to us by the magic of a little
child's presence in our home--the little body that has been mysteriously
fashioned in our image, the little soul given into our keeping.

But for the children, marriage would indeed be a universal failure. In
their interest it was instituted and it is they who make it possible.
Children make a happy union perfect and an indifferent one happy. Very
often they patch up an utter failure into at least an endurable
partnership. When a childless marriage proves happy--really happy--it is
generally because the man and woman are particularly attached to each
other, or are people of unusual character.

One knows of rare instances where husband and wife have grown dearer and
more closely knit by reason of having no other object to divide their
affection. The wife, with lesser cares, not needing to merge the
sweetheart in the mother, remains more youthful in her husband's eyes
than would otherwise be possible, whilst on the man is lavished her
maternal as well as her wifely devotion, and he is at once husband and
child to her. In such a union one can see the sacred element, although
it has produced no children; a couple of this kind does not seem to miss
the little ones that never c