When Christ made faith the corner-stone of his religion, when he said that with faith we could move the mountains, he was inspired, perhaps, by that ardent faith which woman is possessed of and which makes her strong in her weakness. Woe to us, if before preparing for an undertaking we should be obliged to weigh with mathematical precision all favorable and unfavorable probabilities; woe to us, if we were to launch only into those enterprises of which we are sure! More than three-fourths of the great achievements would never have been performed. There is always an element which evades calculation, and it is in the capricious hands of destiny; it is the lacuna which must be filled by faith, by that faith which lifts the mountains, and which woman so deeply feels and so tenderly infuses into our hearts. You may point at the most celebrated eunuchs of the heart, who, without the aid of woman, reached the prodigious heights of fame; but I most solemnly affirm that, had they been guided by a loving hand, they would have soared still higher. Love is a second sight, and woman sees things from a point of view which nearly always escapes the synthetic survey of man; she discovers many hidden elements of things which we, through excessive haste or excessive pride, do not see; and helping us with the light of love, she assists us in penetrating more deeply into the substance of every problem and, above all, into the knowledge of human nature. In small and great things, after having consulted science and art, experience and imagination, after having read the book of history and the book of the human heart, you should never fail to consult the woman who loves you; whether about a book, or a law, or a work of art, or commerce, or industry, or poetry, woman will always have something new to tell you, she will always have her revelations, and through the action of love you will feel elevated.
Some men of talent lack the coefficient of ambition to ascend, and you will often see them die before producing the fruit of their gigantic forces; only woman and love can give them that energy which they cannot obtain from the stimulus of self-love. Eve knows how to infuse faith into the skeptic, ambition into the disheartened, strength to all; unaspiring for herself, she is intensely ambitious, haughty, proud, if necessary, for the man she loves; and thrones and political power, civil and martial crowns, glories of art and science, were won through the ambition lent or inspired by a beloved woman. In heroic and chivalrous ages this was publicly proclaimed and boasted of; today, when women are sold in houses of prostitution or at the counter of matrimony, it has become fashionable to blush at owing one's glory to a woman, and the chivalrous element, alas! sank and perished together with many other evil things which we would not like to see come back again. Chivalrous love vanished and its place was taken by the cicisbeism of our great-grandfathers, while today in the limbo of a new rising generation we feel that we begin to discern the germs of a more beautiful epoch for the amorous life of man.
The more ballast love throws away which keeps it near to the ground, the higher we soar in the regions of the ideal. This ballast consists all of lust and self-pride, and it is woman's duty to help us throw it out of our car. She should not assist with her lasciviousness and her vanity in further debasing man's loves, already so brutish and vulgar. In the rapture we feel when inhaling the pure air of the loftiest mountains, we may sometimes forget that night is drawing near and home is far away; and thus in love we may feel so carried away by the fascination of the ideal as to desire a love without contact, the spirit without the matter. These are sublime derangements of the brain, only too rare, but reaching the extreme limits of human possibilities; they lead to delirium, to self-sacrifice; they drag us to folly or to martyrdom. If a desire continues durable and pure upon the highest summits of human love and is not perturbed by the contact of matter, men from beneath will contemplate that statue as a fantastic monument erected by the morning clouds of the mountain. Not knowing whether it is an effect of the mist or the imagery of a dream, they contemplate and admire.
The pure and intimate communion of thought and sentiment, with nothing of the senses but two clasping hands and two pairs of eyes which blend together, is certainly a voluptuousness among the greatest of the sexual world; and without any need of platonic love, it may so happen that two creatures in that moment will forget that one of them is a man and the other a woman. Then feminine nature shines with all the halo of its celestial light; from that source of poetry, genius may draw its greatest energies. Then coarse natures undergo the influence of refinement in that pure air, social scrofula disappears and all human soil is washed off. Women, you should take advantage of those fleeting instants to regenerate the human family and urge it on to higher destinies! The influence of the ecstasy of sentiment on man is of shorter duration than on woman, and your angel will soon fall at your feet, imploring of you the kiss of the terrestrial creature. You are omnipotent then, for you have the lion at your feet; and if man is strong, you are stronger still, since his strength is all for you. Guide it toward the good and the better; direct it to the beautiful. In that lion which roars with a subdued voice at your feet there is still much of the beast; in that conquered Hercules there is still much of the human brute. Silence the beast by running your slender fingers through his disheveled mane, summon forth from the depths holy energies, noble inspirations and a thirst for the ideal. We wish to be great for your sake; we wish to be strong in order to give you all our strength; we desire the conquest, but only to place it at your feet. To every kiss of yours may the human family owe a great attainment; to every endearment of yours, a useful deed! May your love be the highest and dearest prize to every ambition! True, you are weak; but when you are desired you are very strong. Who dares assert that he is stronger than the "no" of a woman? What phalanx attempts to advance when the finger of woman threatens and commands: "Stand back!"?
Woman sins at least four times less than man; she fears crime, she is horrified at the very thought of crime. Let us, then, disarm the man who too often wounds or strikes; let the coward find no woman who loves him, let him have no cup but that of the coarsest voluptuousness; let the ignorant, the debased, the social parasites, all the fiends of the moral world, find no bosom of woman on which to rest their heads! As the Church once would banish excommunicated persons, so that they could find no bread, no shelter, it should so be with moral monsters: let them be banished from the region of love! And the elect women, whom nature favored with the fateful gift of beauty, should preserve their treasures for the strong and the immortal; their smiles should be the crown of triumphing genius and magnanimous heart, for genius and beauty are the most sublime interlacement of human forces, one of the most splendid pictures of the nature of living beings.
Love, after having spread the minute fibrils of its tiny roots into all the deep fissures of the human world and absorbed every drop of liquor, every throb of energy, sends up to the branches of the robust tree every sap and every energy; and there, high in the air, leaves, flowers, and fruits drink from the rays of the sun the sweetest and most inebriating voluptuousness. There, in those regions full of light and heat, and which no worm of the soil, no atom of dust, no miasmatic exhalation ever attain, profundity becomes sublimity, and man and woman, blended in the ecstasy of an ardent contemplation of the beautiful and the good, ask of themselves: "And what is God?"