Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/137

 Few men learn how to treat women till after forty years of age mainly because they are badly compounded; but they can by persistent efforts make amends. Attention to home and for home begets chemical changes that soon bring about better fusion of souls.

Most unhappy marriages owe much of their bitter fruits to too great physical intimacy and the consequent magnetic exhaustion; the cure for which is to be found in separate couches till the balance is restored. Proof: how dear John and Mary are to each other for a week after his return from a long absence! But when the bodies are mutually filled with the same kind of magnetism they instantly cease to attract and begin to repel; hence never let such be the case, and marriage in its other aspect will be sugary all along the valley. Again: there is no agency equal to family wash-ups, — weekly at the altar of the bath-god, where the soap priest offers up his sacrifice to the lord of magnetic purity. No one can be virtuous in soiled linen, nor wholly bad in the mere chemistry of life!

True. But chemistry lies at the bottom of existence. Large livers beget an alkaline condition, a generative tendency, and it boils over in "prayer-meetings" and "glory to the Lamb" — not pure worship of God, but a magnetic furore that exhausts itself in physico-emotional excitement, as bereft of true fervor as polished steel is of mildew. Large spleens beget acid states of body, and we have lemoncholy religion as a result. It is cold, — cold seeks its opposite, heat. And therefore such people are happier when warming themselves at hell-fire, and going in for strong excitement. " But marriage woes spring from mental differences. She is ignorant, he is knowing," and all that sort of objections are set forth. "Why didn't you look out for that before? But it is not a good plea." People don't marry for the sake of brains, but for souls and bodies. The world of feeling is vaster than the world of thought. It is less tiresome and more congenial. Love never reasons, and when it is attempted to gauge it by line and plummet, rule and square, good-by love, — it's up and away. Love belongs to the domain of emotion; intellect to the marble ice regions of mathematics. Love never venerates the thought, but adores the thinker, it worships not the act, but the power behind it; intellect never begets happiness, emotion always does. Read a geometrical