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Rh me to refuse to hear the voice of my reason and my conscience.”

He found himself repeating, in calmer tones, the savage outcry of the murderer Posdnicheff against love and marriage.

“He who regards woman—above all his wife—with sensuality, already commits adultery with her.”

“When the passions have disappeared, then humanity will no longer have a reason for being; it will have executed the Law; the union of mankind will be accomplished.”

He will prove, on the authority of the Gospel according to Matthew, that “the Christian ideal is not marriage; that Christian marriage cannot exist; that marriage, from the Christian point of view, is an element not of progress but of downfall; that love, with all that precedes and follows it, is an obstacle to the true human ideal.”

But he had never formulated these ideas clearly, even to himself, until they fell from the lips of Posdnicheff. As often happens with great creative artists, the work carried the writer with it; the artist outstripped the thinker; a process by which