Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/35

30 pay, and—I'll see you in—well, you can guess where—first." That's human talk!

IX. As already said herein, marriage—by which term hereinafter, whenever and wherever printed in italic letters, I mean the nuptive union of the sexes; and it is only really nuptive when love is the prompter; otherwise it is a desecration and worse than beastly profanation—is productive of an entire series of effects and results aside from the perpetuatory or propagative one wherein man and animals are alike, and therein only; for in them sex distinctions are, of course, merely bodily, while in the human it involves and embraces the entire vast domain of both body, soul, and the interwoven spirit. In the non-human races the marriage office ceases when the germ is lodged; but in the human being its offices only begin at that point; for its results continue, whether the rite be propagative or no, not only through an arc or chord of fleeting time; but they, the results, stretch away into and through the infinite and eternal spaces, and probably cease not, but endure forever and forever.

If there is one thing more certain, after death, than another, it is that every immortal man and woman of us is bound and doomed to have all love and lust escapades universally known. We are destined to meet all with whom we have been carnally intimate in any degree, from that of pure and gentle love, to the horror and violence of inhuman rape. Every carnal association affects us, leaves its mark on us and the other; and some there be who will be astonished that their whole career was turned on earth in consequence of such or such an act—fact; and that defeat followed them in after life by reason of the invisible presence of some wronged victims, married or not. Nor is this all, for every escapade mingles magnetisms more or less; and a man in New York in 1875 may feel the life going out of him day by day, himself not even suspecting that a dozen or more women in as many different parts of the earth, or even from the spaces, are at that instant thinking of him, yearning for him, voluntarily or not, and are drawing out his soul just as easily and surely as he drew their life through honeyed lips ten, twenty, or thirty years before; wherefore libertinism and cyprianism are attended with strange penalties.