purpose which strike him
with undefined awe.

Therefore, in the myths and legends which the early races framed to
express their notions of divine things,--the Fates, who spin and snip
the thread of life; the Norns, who

Lay down laws,
And select life
For the children of time--
The destinies of men,--

are always females. The seeresses and interpreters of oracles--those
who, like the witch of Endor, could summon from the grave the shades of
the departed--were women.

Therefore, also, modern infidelity, going back, as it ever does, to the
ignorance of the past, and holding it up as something new, makes woman
the only deity. Comte and his disciples, having reasoned away all gods,
angels, and spirits, and unable to still the craving for something to
adore, agree to meet once a week to worship--woman. The French
revolutionists, having shut up the churches and abolished God by a
decree of the Convention, set up in His stead--a woman.

We could never exhaust this phase of world-history. Everywhere we see
the unexpected hand of Love moulding, fashioning all things. The
fortunes of the individual, the fate of nations, the destinies of races,
are guided by this invisible thread. Let us push our inquiries as to the
nature of this all-powerful agent.

WHAT IS LOVE?

It has a divided nature. As we have an immortal soul, but a body of
clay; as the plant roots itself in decaying earth, but spreads its
flowers in glorious sunlight,--so love has a physiological and a moral
nature. It is rooted in that unconscious law of life which bids us
perpetuate our kind; which guards over the conservation of life; which
enforces, with ceaseless admonition, that first precept which God gave
to man before the gates of Eden had been closed upon him: 'Be thou
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.' Nothing but a spurious
delicacy, or an ignorance of facts, can prevent our full recognition
that love looks to marriage, and marriage to offspring, as a natural
sequence.

Do we ask proofs of this? We have them in abundance. Those unfortunate
beings who are chosen by Oriental custom to guard the seraglios undergo
a mutilation which disqualifies them from becoming parents. Soon all
traces of passion, all regard for the other sex, all sentiments of love,
totally disappear. The records of medicine contain not a few cases where
disease had rendered it necessary to remove the ovaries from women. At
once a change took place