"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and evening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on the tomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of every home; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress of immortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless things to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay. It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, but with it—earth is Heaven and we are gods."
It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever been recognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of life are worthless.
It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age of commercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may be bartered for.
Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful and magic solvent which transmutes all baser emotions into the higher, the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is not sexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, or altruistic 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 than wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting that we realize in our interior nature that we have not yet loved any human being with as great a love as we are capable of.
If any one holds the mistaken idea—and it is one that is very generally held—that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finer phase of emotion than that expressed in procreation; and that in order to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew all other phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his being in the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat. The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confronted with the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to break the laws of God." We need not worry at all about the laws of God, whether we call these Cosmic Law, or Nature, or Divine Providence or something else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worry whether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as he does not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we may permit him the same liberty.