Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/134

 When a man begins to think, then there is hope of that man; but whoever can, and will not, think, proves himself a bigot and an ass!

Virtue don't consist in a membrane! Some people say it does, but some people are fools. It is soul that is virtuous, if virtue there be, and not a cartilage!

The marriage relation is, as times go, a very uncertain institution; mainly because each party to it insists upon moving socially, psychically, and in every other way, in separate spheres. And the most knowing men and women, Rosicrucians included, are generally stone blind in that direction, while wide awake to every other beneath the sun; but practically the thing is reversed, and we have them in patches all over the " garden of humanity." Of late many attempts have been made to account for this evil and to supply an appropriate remedy. As a general thing the female army of marriage protestors lay all the blame of uncongeniality, etc., etc., to the male side of the house, and we are surfeited with abundant talk about "man's animal passions," and all that sort of thing. The human male is bad, worse, and worst, while the other side is good, better, and best, — which is false and nonsense; for as many males writhe beneath this galling yoke as females ; and in the final adjustment of the whole matter it will be found that the trouble does not always originate in man's animality.

And I here take occasion to defend my sex from that atrocious charge, and to affirm that, 1, we males are, taken on an average quite as good as the other side of the house, and are just as capable of knowing when we are well treated as they are. 2. Nor does it originate in non-affinity; for people very seldom enter that relation unless there be a most decided affinity between them.

3. Nor does the trouble spring from the supposed fact that somewhere in heaven or earth or elsewhere there is one particular man cut out to exactly suit one particular woman, for that stuff is exploded — was disproved long ago. Any living human being can find thousands of totally dissimilar affinities, in every land beneath the sky, with whom he could live in perfect accord till a certain fabled place was covered with ice a league thick. "Eternal affinity " is infernal fol de rol. Once I spent some weeks beneath the roof of one of the worst women God or nature ever created, a