Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/161

 suits. ... It is sometimes true that woman is like the ivy-vine clustering about an old oak-tree — the more you are ruined the closer she clings, and the closer she clings the more you are ruined; but that is the one exception to the general rule. . . . The truest man is he whose nature is more than one-half woman. The truest woman is she w ho can enter into, appreciate, and enjoy the intellectual and spiritual as well as the social nature of her husband. Such men make the most lasting mark upon the walls of the ages; such women hand themselves down the longest line of centuries.

The thing that most astonishes and confounds my soul is the terrible and sublime mystery of child-bearing. It is awe-ful — holy and sacred beyond my power of expression. To think that from a microscopical point, an infinitesimal filament, is in an hour engendered and incarnated a priceless, deathless human soul, destined to immortal youth and beauty when toppling mountains have crumbled into dust, and sweeping galaxies have grown hoary with age! And this thought alone should endear woman to every living man; and if husbands would but remember with what unutterable agonies every child is ushered into the world, they would think twice ere acting once against the woman's peace, who for his sake undergoes, and repeatedly, the frightful ordeal; for it is notorious that what affords solace to the husband is, nine times in ten, a sacrifice and ordeal to nine-tenths of the large-brained, fine-nerved wives of, at least, this section of Christendom. . . . As a general thing the love of American husbands is fitful, tempestuous, once-in-a-whilish, while it is the nature of all women alike to love right on like a deep-rolling river — not a seething, bubbling, clattering, leaping, jumping, tearing rapids, which comes to a full stop as soon as it tumbles over the falls of — possession. . . . I believe that all that made Jesus what he was and still is, the supreme man of all the past ages, was his mother. I remember well how I laughed at a lady lecturer when she spoke so glowingly of "The divine work of woman," when lecturing on maternity and all it involved. That was long years ago, and I have lived to see the day wherein I cry aloud Amen! to all she then and has since said on the same subject; for on that one point hinges the weal or woe of all the coming centuries; for if that divine work be well done we shall have no more need of dying