Love never grows old, love never perisheth.”
Affection and Perfection.
Love is so closely connected with our lives, and all that makes or mars our peace and pleasure, health and beauty, that I should feel guilty of a sin of omission by excluding this item from my chapter on health and happiness.
To be unloved is to be unhappy. Do not forget the connection between health and happiness. They are all but synonymous terms.
You may know the unloved and unlovely by the lines of care, dissipation, or crime that are furrowed upon their brows. Go into the highways, and you may readily pick out the unloved child by its unsatisfied expression of countenance. It lifts its great, hungry eyes to yours instinctively, and asks for love and sympathy as plainly by that searching look, as the child of penury, the bread-starveling asks for alms when it presents its scrawny hand, and in pitiful tones says, “Please give me a penny, for God’s sake.”
O, give the child “love,” for God’s sake; for he so loved the world that he gave us his only begotten Son, who only in turn taught us to love.
Physical perfection is never found in the unloved.
The unloved wife is not long beautiful, nor the child of such. There is a marked difference between them and the wife and child that the husband and father cherishes and caresses with unrestrained affection. In sickness love divides the burden, as in the common toils of life.
Disguise or deny the truth of the assertion if you will, woman must love somebody or some thing. She were not otherwise a true woman, nor made in the image of her Maker. If the husband denies her that affection which truly belongs to her nature, he must not blame her, but himself, if she loves another. She will cling to something. If she has no children upon whom to lavish her affections, she will love some other’s, or a pet canary, or even a cat, or lapdog; but love she will.
Separating the Sheep and Goats.