sity, in conscience, of bolting in fact should teach us that parties have had their day; and shall the man, refusing to be a political, consent to be an ecclesiastical slave? Let Orthodoxy or Heresy, Free Religion or Christianity, have no servant in my soul. I will not be a slave to myself, or follow the shadow of my own mean and mendacious past. I claim a liberty, older and more than Christ made me free with; of the sons of God.

V.

SEX.

A

Næronant says, the voice of a woman can be

heard twice as far as that of a man in a balloon. How well it deserves a hearing as it rises clear and shrill out of inveterate wrong! What misfit of the sister to the brother's side she was taken from not to divide but multiply human nature, lie the blame where it will, when the worst feature of our civilization can have Social Evil for its name! The way out of our narrowness may not be so easy as the way in. The weasel that creeps into the corn-bin has to starve himself before he can leave by the same passage. As the last step in medicine is learning to prevent disease by anticipating morbid action or inaction in the cells of the nervous system, so prevent the disorder we call sin or crime! An idealist biting his nails being asked what he was thinking of, answered, of what a wretched thing this life is. Truly much uneasiness, of which all this running round the world, which we call travelling, must be to get rid. How few happy marriages, we exclaim. Marriage is mischief, cry the Free Lovers, and use for their picture only black. Is life a tragedy, comedy, or farce? If it be a symphony, the music is

too deep for our ear to catch. What way out of domestic trouble?

Is it to strike at the family? But that is the block or brick out of which the fabric is built. Father, mother and child are the human trinity, whose substance must not be divided nor its persons confounded. As well reconstruct your granite out of the grains it is disintegrated into, as society out of the dissolution of wedded love. This orderly pile of houses in rows along the streets, this immense hive and honeycomb, with cells so distinct, yet joined together, is the community. Wedlock is the foundation, Church and State the second and third stories of the building. But what abuses it covers, and what a whited sepulchre it sometimes is, full of dead men's and dead women's bones, and all uncleanness; so that a new school of honest reformers is provoked to disallow the bond! We must listen and answer; for the foundation of marriage is among the things that must be discussed, however breaches of its law be punished. When the parties to the contract "till death do us part" wake from their dream of delight, and become conscious of stronger affinities, shall they not illustrate the experiment of chemical combination on which Goethe founded his tale? "Shall they," wrote one, "stand looking at each other with murder in their eyes?" What business with murder in their eyes, more than with poison in the cup, death in the pot, or pistol in the hand? Hatred in the heart is murder in the eyes for anybody; and they would be assassins together or apart. The plea of no more love is confession of crime. Love is duty, not inability or fate. With it we can get along

with any mortal; nor could we live with angels discarding its bonds. The illusion is not choice of the wrong person, but the supposition of magic in any person to hold another without conscience by fealty of the fading flesh. But infinite selfishness revolts at discovering that the universe is not made to minister by some eternal decree to its delight, with a match made in heaven for its acme and crown. "I think she will make me happy"? If that be your design in the relation, be sure very long she will not! If we abolish marriage for its disappointments or even its corruptions, why not annul society, government, the church, for the same reason? But no evil can equal anarchy, and any rule is better than none. "Is there any king here?" asked the Greek sage, on arriving at a town, ready to shake off the dust of his feet. But what in case of uncongeniality or disloyalty? I knew a woman love an unfaithful man, forgive desertion, shield him from others' rebuke, call attention to his good qualities, and cast a cloak over the bad, fold him to her bosom despite his offence, and open her heart for the refuge that had failed elsewhere till ruin stared him in the face. I worshipped not the Virgin Mary, or her Mother immaculate by the Pope's decree, but this woman, whose quality I knew better than of those enshrined antiques; surperstition having in my devotion no jot. How was she consoled? Not by pouring her tale into the ear of any other man! She coveted in no third person the dear deceptive sympathy of sex. To her untouched purity and intangible love there were no solace in being unfaithful herself. Beware of having wounds healed or handled by a physician who will find

his own account in the cure! There are counsellors who are traitors: there is a pity which is hypocrisy ; there is in the distressed citadel an enemy that beckons the caller and opens the door; and the worst treason lurks hid in a tear. Some magnetism of human kindness we need to sustain life. If home lacks, we must seek it abroad; as, when his own board fails, a man goes to another table or stands at a booth in the street. But let it be pure food, not tainted meat! God's curse on the sympathy that is a trap for the unwary, like a bit of cheese or kernel of grain in the closet or the woods, for some poor beast's life; the escape from trouble a strait to torment or whirlpool to devour. Blessed not who surrender, but endure! Suffering is God's tool to cut life into beauty; and he that bolts from trial, would shake off the Supreme Designer's hand.

The attempt to destroy marriage is, in the guise of freedom, a doctrine of individualism reduced to absurdity, gone mad and run into the ground. We reach this destructive extreme through a false notion of society as our creature when it is our creator, prior to and no more made by us than God is. The community is formed; but private human creatures do not by any will or bargain form it, as is imagined by the French or American democracy that would put the individual before the whole. Pure individuality is an empty figment; and the preacher of a man's and woman's right to do as they list irrespective of the common law is an individualist, not an idealist. He postpones the integer to the units and integrity to caprice. We are not all sovereigns, as a Yankee said of us in the House of