Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/170

 sick. It sends a man to the brothel, or else makes him either a saloonatic or the keeper of a mistress, a robbing, lying macloonatic, — a harlot in grain.

Woman's love never, or seldom, based on passion, flows on calmly; but once a month she becomes supremely tender, and then not only is her power at high tide, but the man who loves her as he should can find a well of joy too deep to sound! How many men know and realize this precious truth? I will not attempt an answer. Different from woman, man's period of love is renewed tit least three times as often! . . . Something may even be learned from the French cyprian's prayer, "O Holy Mary, Mother of God, who conceived without sinning, grant us, in thy mercy, that if we cannot be perfect like thee, that at least we may sin without conceiving, for we cannot help being what we are; men made us so, and so the world keeps us. It is not our fault, O Mary; therefore grant our prayer, and forbid that our dreadful necessity should be the means of perpetuating crime and sin from mother to child! "Don't that prayer contain a core?

To purify mankind we must resort to something more effective than moral teaching. We must find means to remove from human bodies the chemical, electric, mechanical, and magnetic conditions whose existence underlies, subtends, and causes all the sin and crimes that are to-day. These sins and crimes we, in our folly, imagine to be really such. It is a mistake, for they are diseases; nothing more, nothing less! . . . Wives should not be chronically serious with their mates, for husbands can appreciate play as well as children. . . . God have pity on the unfortunate wight who is tied to a "strong-minded" female! . . . The man or woman who truly loves and is loved, never grows old — seldom in the eyes of others, hardly ever in their own; but love makes us all young and keeps us so. Those who have read my "After Death; or, Disembodied Man, "a work not published under a nom de plume, as was "Love and its Hidden History," one edition of which was sent forth as "By the Count de St. Leon," to please my publishers, not myself, will remember the description therein of the loving souls of the farther country, and that sex is not left behind us after, but that it goes with us there, and has its uses — not propagative — far more strange and wonderful than here upon