Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter Vin the sanctity of marriage the natural sacredness of marriage demands further consideration of our subject in a manner wholly affirmative, as if divorces were unknown or only vaguely possible. To that demand this concluding chapter is intended to be in some measure a response. Marriage itself, which is constituted by the harmonious union of one man and one woman through reciprocal love abiding in its nature, is a natural human relationship. It is as natural as motherhood and fatherhood, to which it is Nature's condition precedent. On the physical or animal plane of human life, this is too obvious to require elucidation. The intimate physical union without which procreation is impossible, furnishes its own demonstration of its own indispensability to fatherhood and motherhood. Describe that relationship as only the expression of a momentary animal impulse if you will, yet the fact remains that even then Nature is seen to declare for monogamy, for unity, for reciprocality, for affection, and in many ways to suggest the idea of abidingness. But man does not live upon the physical or animal plane alone. Though we brush aside all thought of human immortality as an idle speculation, we cannot escape the obtrusive natural fact, a fact in the domain of human nature, that man possesses moral as well as physical qualities. You may say, if you will, that moral qualities are nothing but modes of the physical; as for instance, that the impulses of human marriages are only poetizations of animal matings, and that the impulses of human motherhood are the same affections in kind as those of the dam for her cub. Nevertheless, as none can deny that human action is often determined by disinterested love of another than one's self or one's own, ..