Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/57

 Love me when my life is ended, And my soul is wafted o'er The river, — and with angels blended On the ever blessed shore. Love! with heart and soul and brain, Love me! We shall meet again. The great tendency of Americans is to waste themselves. The modern civilizees, of either gender, are like untamed horses, needing very little, if any, whip or spur, but a great deal of curb and check rein; and even then not seldom the passions get the bit, and away goes somebody to ruin, moral, physical, intellectual, at a break-neck rate of speed. The young, and old too, very often forget that passion's tide will one day ebb as well as flow, and may leave sorry wrecks high and dry upon the rocks of disaster, disease, physical and mental impotence, insanity, or worse, ere life's voyage be normally half over. If you doubt it, just look around you upon the ten thousand "splendid wrecks" of men and women, to be met every day, stranded, ruined, — walking pest-houses, creeping spectres, scarce forty years old, dolefully wending their way through the world, whose only joy is the fun lamps of lang syne, now, alas! gone out forever. Nearly all of us are bound slaves to some dominant power, — money, fame, place, amorousness, drink. Talk about resisting the "devil!" That were a comparatively easy task, provided he came in proper, tangible shape, with horns, hoofs, and so forth, all complete; but when he attacks a man or woman through the passions, especially amativeness run wild, as it is to-day, great Heaven! what amount of courage, care, watchfulness, persistence, stamina, does it not require to successfully beat back this formidable enemy of human weal and virtue! especially when, as of late years, in this dismal age, it attacks us panoplied in "philosophic" armor, backed by never so many "scientific" reasons, axioms, historic parallels, sanitary hypotheses, ancient examples, and modern ones too, drawn from our barn-yards, mainly! To be mistress or master of yourself is a service rather difficult to thoroughly accomplish, owing to the law of transmission of qualities, for the weaknesses of the parents are suffered for by the children to half a dozen generations. Yes, indeed, the devil can be defeated by one or two pater-nosters; but when for bullets he uses