Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/54

 persistent tenderness are the most wonderful solvents known. Have you shown him true wifeliness? or have you fallen into the popular error that all a wife's duty consists in keeping house, and tacitly doing from habit all he demands of you? If so, turn squarely around and sail on the other tack. You'll soon win him from the arms and charms of all rivals. Study his weak points, and attack him.

and now say: "But love depends to a great extent upon the congenialities of personal magnetisms. We repel each other; how is it possible for us to assimilate? " I have already answered that question in another form. The will can effect wonders. Will therefore to love each other and the good thought and act will be an alterative, utterly changing the entire mind, spirit, soul, thought, and body. Not in a clay or week, but in a very little time. Not one tenth of our marital difficulties are real; or if real, but that can be outgrown by persistent trying. While a man and wife are socially, maritally, or magnetically hostile, seduction is not difficult to those who are loose in that respect and adepts in the art; for whoever then approaches magnetically or sympathetically nearer than the mate, pushes that mate further off, and in nine cases in ten the attraction toward an "outsider" is merely physical or magnetic, but is too frequently mistaken for love and genuine affection. Gratify the passion thus engendered, and the results are appalling, for just so soon as the passional and magnetic storm is over, a worse chaos looms up again.

He comes too near who comes to be denied! She is unwomanly who purposely tempts a man. They are barbarous who seek to destroy a bond which, though iron, can be changed to one of silver or gold, wreathed and rose-entwined.

Divorce ought ever be the last resort. But our laws on that point ought to be so modified as to afford relief without either forcing one or other of the parties to crime or public litigation and indecent exposure of domestic secrets.

"Nothing comes of nothing" is not true, since an empty-headed fool often causes uncounted trouble.

In these days of Spiritualism there exist countless pretenders to the strange science, who counterfeit the mental phenomena and use the sacred thing as a cloak under which to hoodwink, impose