Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/143

 destroy the power of the glands alluded to elsewhere. Modern tangle-leg whiskey, warranted to kill at forty paces, kills love at twice that distance, on principles purely chemical. The strawberry and pear, peach and grape, make love; and that's why the French are such general lovers. Beer and malt destroy love; that's why England is the land of wife-misery.

4. Methodist love-feasts prove the materiality of love. The sisters affect the brothers, and then the brothers react upon the sisters. Love-aura fills the room, and all become impregnated therewith, especially the sisters. They all become psychologized, and call it the "grace of God." It's a very good sort of psychology; I rather like it. A brother prays, and the more vigorous his body the more unction will his prayer have; his love is at high-tide. Next day he finds himself played out, and can't get up the glory again, except on a capital of good eating! 5. The love-element may become diseased; it is often so. That's the cause of so many miserable families. The love of a man, being diseased, acts as a direct poison upon his wife, in consequence of which she soon grows thin, pale, or sallow. Affection and respect fly out of the window, and the home becomes a hell on earth, — a hell, too, which a little common sense, such as is herein set forth, will speedily retransform into a happy heaven. I advise the philosophers to try it. 6. Love is life, is heat, is energy. The old heads knew it, when they tried to reanimate the used-up David with a Bathsheba bath; but it didn't work. Why? Because his excesses had deprived him of responsive power. He was that awful spectacle, — a human wreck.

7. Christ was perfect love, incarnate. That's why he was so good a doctor. Modern M. D.'s cure by the laying on of' hands. How? They rouse up the organs of the patient by infusion of their own love. If they keep it up long it is dangerous — they waste away. Why? Because their love is exhausted.

8. There is a class of human vampyres in the world, who draw out the love of all of the opposite sex with whom they come in contact. People near whom they move feel the virtue going from them in streams. I speak of professional vampyres; but a similar phenomenon occurs with honest people. They are drawn to each other with terrible power; it is love seeking its equilibrium. They