Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/67

62 It is indeed very seldom that an Eastern woman resorts to that sinless method, and then only when age, disease, or malformations render it imperative. On the contrary, offspring are rightly considered as special blessings from the Supreme God; hence, the first lesson a bride receives from her mother are those that favor such a result. She is told to wholly, fully, freely, prayerfully abandon her entire faculties and being to the one grand end of woman-life—the sacred mission of the wifely mother. Hence it happens that the Oriental wife is always pure; there are not a hundred adulteresses or child-killers in all Islam, with its 200,000,000 votaries! There is not as many of those fearful crimes committed among all the Moslems, in ten years, as disgrace Boston, New York, or Philadelphia every month we live. The Oriental wife, with all her glowing soul, wills—save in very rare instances—to be fruitful, as all women should; and becomes so. There are rare cases in which a wife cannot, without imperilling her life, undergo the ordeal of maternity, and then, and then only, the timely exercise of the will alone forestalls death, prevents crime, and obviates all suffering.

XXVIII. Love, I have stated, is magnetic, and subject to magnetic law. It is a force also, capable, as all know, of exerting very strange effects both upon human souls and bodies. But how? that's the question! Tell us that! I will, listen:—

Matter and mind, in some mysterious way, are not only both alike and unlike, and conjoin to form the thing called man, but they act together directly and indirectly, fully or partially, and yet are not of the same nature, albeit they act and react upon each other in myriad ways, a fact which every one's experience demonstrates beyond cavil. One thing is absolutely certain; that the mind resides in the brain; that in it inheres what constitutes us human; and that the conscious point resides in the centre of the encephalon, at that spot where all three brains meet, viz., cerebrum, cerebellum and medulla, or spinal marrow, which is an elongated brain, is a clear fact, the proof of which can be found by consulting any good anatomical and physiological atlas. In this central point, as through and around the corpus callosum, there is, in death, a nervous and spheral waste;