Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/74

 This story is as common in society as are sunrises on the world. It is safe to say that just such a skeleton, blighted hopes and wrecked affection, can be found in seven households in every ten; and still the grim tragedy goes on, and its elements are waywardness, thoughtlessness, lack of bearance and forbearance, selfishness or lust, resulting in coolness, coldness, estrangement, disgust, and hatred. Love is a tender flower, and must be carefully nursed, or it will wither and decay, after which, one of two roads lie before the victims, — sickness, wasting, and death, or desperation, and — a liaison; for it is human nature to yearn for affection, and if it cannot be had at home it will be sought for elsewhere, and accepted wherever and whenever found. How many of you who read this book, and "After Death," know the force of God's truth, now falling from my pen, and how many of you daily behold the skeleton in your own closets! To render the sum-total less, and because I have suffered just there, is why I have written on Love and its Hidden History.

Somebody thinks the marriage service should read thus:—

"Clergyman: Will you take this stone mansion, this carriage and pair, and these diamonds for thy wedded husband? Yes. Will you take this unpaid milliner's bill, this high chignon of foreign hair, these affected accomplishments and feeble constitution for thy wedded wife? Yes. Then what man has joined together let the next best man run away with, so that the first divorce court may tear them asunder;" and not be far wrong either as times go.

It often happens that an unexpressed thought of one person is felt by the other without a word being spoken or an overt act done. Married people to each other can be, and often are, the veriest hypocrites; and many a man and wife have lain down at night with murder and suicide for bedfellows, requiring but one more feather's weight to crush a soul and send another victim of misplaced confidence home to God.

Many of our sufferings on account of love come vicariously. Away back in the foretime some of our progenitors have transgressed its mysterious laws, mental, moral, or physical, and we are called upon to pay the cost; for "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children." No truer line was ever written, and it will stand so while