I now approach a very delicate portion of my essay: the question of the marriage relation. By many it is scouted with much virtuous indignation, but I conceive that the liberal, who, like too many, dare not discuss this matter in its broadest and widest aspects, should be stigmatized as unworthy of the name. Christ is reported to have urged the admirers of his ethical system to take up their cross and follow him, leaving father, mother, wife, children, and all they may have—thus Shelley acted, and it bears as equally pregnant lessons to free thinkers as it did to those Syrian fishermen. Oh, that liberals had as much "faith" in the truth, in the efficacy of their cause, as the first Christians are said to have had in the teachings of that Christ whom they regarded not as a Divinity, but as a son of God, as we to-day are sons of God, of the most high! Oh, that we could carry that "faith" into our beliefs, and the determination to be stopped at no obstacle which may bar the progress of truth, which must conquer in the end!
The favorite theme in the writings of Shelley is "Eros," love of the individual, of the race, of nature, and in this he follows Christ, in whose system of Philosophy, Love is ever the pre-dominating idea which permeates mankind with its beneficial effects, and will, when the bastard tinsel with which the truths of the Nazarene are hidden, be replaced by that pure gold which it is impossible to trace in the enunciations of any previous philosopher. This subject is always present to Shelley, and he thus appeals in one of his poems to the
"Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live, and are."
In another place he inquires—
"What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? Ask him who adores, what is God?"
And in the same essay he describes love as
"The bond and sanction which connects man with man, and with everything which exists."
Elsewhere he points out that the attainment of love
"urges forth the power of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules, (and that) so soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was."