Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/131

 sympathy, love, tenderness, and great patience on his part, for she can not help her vagaries. Bread thus thrown upon the waters will return a harvest of love ere many days. 4. A wife is a truer friend, even if homely, than the most beautiful outsider that ever lived. 5. Take your wife into your counsels; the place of amusement; walk, talk, and be pleasant with her. Attentions pay large interest. 6. Never bring all your troubles home to saddle them on her; and 7, and last, Study your wife, and adapt yourself to her; let her really be your other half; for, lo! ye twain are one flesh. No matter what mothers-in-law, or any relation, may say or do. Remember that ye twain are one, and " For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and cleave (only) to his wife." Very few men do it, however, for there's a chronic hankering in most of them after some other woman than the wife; and this is because Love is not at the base of their union. It will not always be so.

The Roscicrucian brotherhood hold certain dogmas to be true, which are not believed by all who live within the pale of the Christian world, and are not fairly understood by even the most advanced thinkers and philosophers. Among these dogmas is that of the absolute existence of a Deity, and that of fate, destiny, and pre-ordination, not in the sense of fixedness, but in the sense of increasing and vanishing forces of organization as played upon by the myriad streams of influences whereto all beings are subjected. The folly of free will ought to be exploded, because it is untrue. No man can by any possibility be free so long as he is enveloped by influence-bearing atmospheres, whether these be oxygenic, carbonic, electric, chemical, social, actinic, domestic, climatic, magnetic, odic, ethereal, religious, refined, coarse, amatory, political, or any other; for all these tend to swerve him more or less, to warp his judgment, and control his thought, feeling, and action, and so long as this indisputable fact obtains, he is not one whit more free in the absolute sense than an apple on the tree is free, which it cannot be so long as the law of acids, sweets, gravity, constitutes the elements of apple law. But, unlike the fruit, man lives within the circle of vanishing quantities and accreting forces.

For instance, a man may be tempted to the very verge of doing a mean act toward any one, and while yielding mentally before the