the mind is not postponed to the relaxation and
enjoyment of the body.

What the ethical religion says to all such as they is this: Live so as
to be worthy of that which you one day hope to receive at Nature's
hands--a pure, good and true wife. Somewhere, in some corner of this
earth, unknown to you, unknown to her, she is being made ready for the
hour of your espousals. You will know her when you see her. Wait
until you do. Remember the requisite preparation of the body, and now
forget not the preparation of the mind.

Marriage is based on friendship, that true kinsman of love, which made
a poet call his friend "O thou half of my own soul!" [2] Your wife
must be your friend. True love, the love of which true marriages are
made, is friendship transfigured--the halo, the glory, of a supreme
emotion coming to crown that which is most enduring on this earth.
Just as we say that our religion is morality, is duty, only
etherealised by viewing it as the expressed mind and will of the Soul
of all souls, the World-intelligence, so do we think of marriage as
based on a union of souls by friendship, inspired by a deep mutual
respect, not for what the partners have, but for what they are, and
finally made glorious in the light of an unfading love. Live, we would
counsel you, so as to be worthy one day of the reverence of a woman's
pure and untried soul.

And our message to womanhood is not dissimilar. Live, we would say, so
that you be worthy of the respect, of the homage of all men. Your
nature is such that virtue in you has a double charm, wherefore you are
visibly marked out as the treasury wherein the ideal is enshrined and
handed down through all the generations of men.

A nation is, ethically speaking, worth just what its women are worth,
and we must therefore rejoice, and greatly rejoice, to know that the
contention which is being increasingly put forth by women, that the men
who demand their sisters' hands should themselves be arrayed in
suitable wedding garment, is convincing evidence of a strong ethical
enthusiasm which is beginning to pervade the sex, and a determination
to ennoble more and more that one great sacramental ordinance of
Nature, marriage.

All things transitory
But as symbols are sent;
Earth's insufficiency grows to event;
The indescribable,
Here it is done,
_The ever-womanly leadeth us_
_Upward and on._
--GOETHE.

[1] Pp. 431-443.

[2] "Dimidium animae mea