We are all one; we minister to ourselves only as we minister to others. We must first sacrifice self, else all the rest will not be added unto us and even that which we have will be taken away. But before we are capable of the wider ministry, we must prove ourselves by the narrower service, and nature, with her wise economy, leads us into a field wherein service and sacrifice are inevitable, and its gateway is marriage.
Emerson gives us the key to this mystery when he says: "The man is only half himself; his other half is his expression." The true expression is service, the ideal which leads us to accept it is brotherhood, and to that expression the other sex is only the embodied opportunity. To that expression marriage is the guardian and the gateway only as husband and wife accept all its culture and all its sacrifices, patiently, joyfully, completely. That signifies, ordinarily, that both husband and wife must lose their personal selves in their children, and if, for selfish reasons, they refuse this service, they are missing the culture of this incarnation. If they refuse it for reasons that are unselfish, for the opportunities of a wider ministry, that is, as Kipling would say, "another story." That is the supreme sacrifice.
It is, in most cases, wiser for husband and wife to fill their home with little children for two reasons. In the first place, through the care of children (the care of their minds and souls not less than of their bodies), each forgets self and learns the A B C of that great lesson in ministry which alone will make universal brotherhood possible upon the face of the earth. Because these sacrifices are more inevitable to the mother than to the father, she is likely to learn this lesson more speedily, and perhaps that is one reason why the Ego clothes itself now in one sex and now in another in the course of its earthly experiences. Perhaps it is that we may learn this lesson of sacrifice well that the newly embodied soul inflicts upon the builders of its physical body such agonies, sacrifices, and anxieties, that their souls seem to be torn up by the very roots, only to be planted, when quiet comes again, upon a higher plateau and in an atmosphere less dense. Emerson has said truly, "Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it."
Under existing conditions the lesson of selflessness will have to be learned by most of us through this very differentiation of sex, and we may make as much ado about it as we please. We may learn it through the agony and the terror of a Hetty Sorrel or a Margaret, both of whom were examples of extreme selfishness; we may accept it gracefully, as do the average man and woman, with a very faint comprehension of what it all means; or we may welcome and glorify parenthood as the Madonna glorified it, prophesy of that future time when every child shall be the child of an immaculate conception. "Help nature and work on with her, and nature shall regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance."[2]
The second reason why the selfish person is delaying his own advancement by refusing to fulfill the duties that he tacitly accepts by marriage is very prosaic. We all like to assure ourselves that we are rays of the Infinite, channels through which alone the God-message may be brought to mankind. That is very inspiring. But it is not so inspiring to reflect that we are also the gateways, self-appointed by the very estate of marriage, through which other souls, more advanced than ourselves perhaps, may come into the physical embodiment which they need for future experience. That is quite another thing, and all the old self which binds our souls rebels. For this means, to a great degree, the sacrifice of our social pleasures, our recreations, time, money, physical ease, perhaps health; it means broken rest, disorderly rooms, the washing of bedaubed little hands, and the kissing of, oh, such dirty little mouths. It means that we have to shut our Æschylus and shelve our Faust and our Homer for a few years at least, and many a father and mother look back with something like longing upon the old days when they lived with these great souls and when their cherished books were not smeared as to bindings and torn as to leaves.
Was it an accident that Froebel called the system of education that he gave to the world "the science of motherhood"? Was it accidental that he should dedicate the deepest and truest philosophy of which I have any conception to the end that the father and the mother, and through them, the child, might become able to look beneath the visible for the invisible which conditions it; beneath the outer phenomena to the spirit which gives it birth; beyond the transitory to the permanent. Such a philosophy makes one very patient with physical duties and sacrifices when they are regarded as only a means to an end that is higher than physical. Such a philosophy makes it somewhat easier to "step out from sunlight into shade to make more room for others."
That is, to me, the ethical side of the now-existing relationship of the sexes about which the reformers are making so much ado. It is these who lament with such vigor the large families of the very poor. Looked at from the standpoint of the eternal, the growing number of childless families among the better classes is a much more serious state of affairs. Large and half-cared for families of children prove nothing more than ignorance on the part of the parents, of both spiritual and physical laws. And the suffering that this ignorance entails will inevitably lead the soul to a higher consciousness. But the other state of affairs is—with exceptions—the result of selfishness; and the more conscious the soul, the greater the alienation resulting from a selfish course of action. Says H. P. B., "The selfish devotee lives to no purpose. The man who does not go through his appointed work in life has lived in vain."
It is very noble to slay the appetites but that may occasionally be only a more subtle phase of selfishness. Besides that, desires that are slain for selfish comfort's sake do not free us from the law. That is why it is such nonsense to seek the solution of this old problem by placing the caprice or whim of the individual man or woman above the law of the universe. As long as men and women are selfish, as long as marriages are made from selfish motives, I bow before the rampant desires that shall force the soul into sacrifices until the self has disappeared. But when the law is obeyed, and when old Karmic debts are paid, woman and man will rise superior to it, the will of the individual become one with the universal will, and the spirit have gained her freedom.
Please do not mistake me. I do not believe that marriage is the only circumstance through which the sexes can become self-poised, completed and stable. I do not believe that those who marry should always accept the limited service that little children demand of them. I do not believe that the sacrifices of fatherhood and motherhood are the highest sacrifices. Nothing of the kind. Marriage is simply a means by which the less advanced souls, the feeble, the selfish, may rise out of feebleness into strength, out of self into God. Susan E. Blow, in her "Study of Dante," has defined the Inferno as the soul filled with self, the Purgatorio as the soul emptied of self, and the Paradiso as the soul filled with God. Dante himself, with his divine insight into the nature of sin, places the jealous souls (become so through selfishness extreme) in icebound Cocytus, at the very pit of the Inferno. To most of us marriage is indeed the gateway leading out of an Inferno of selfishness, and it is marriage that places upon our backs the precious burdens which we must carry up the Purgatorio mountain. "The more we climb the less it hurts until we seem to fly."[3] But climb we must until the burdens have all fallen and the self has disappeared. By the light of "the dim star that burns within" the cyclic path must be ascended. But when the top has been reached "its light will suddenly become the infinite light." We shall have entered the Paradiso.
Advanced souls, those who are capable of wider and better service, need not to complete themselves in marriage nor to find their expression in the opportunities it gives them. They are strong enough to find it voluntarily in a cause. They do not marry on the physical plane, but truly wedded are they on the spiritual plane and in that marriage to the needs of the world they find the other half, their expression. They cease their hovering between opposites and are stable.