Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/95

 The words in the Gospel about a husband and a wife not being two but one, have a great significance. To break off the connection by marriage, to separate, or to commit an act that might call forth illfeeling in the spouse: you may only do this when before God and your conscience, you cannot act otherwise.

I think that a man's deserting his wife, who has a child by him, is a bad act, which cannot but have an effect in the shape of a trail of grave consequences, and which are gravest not for the deserted wife, but for the husband who deserts her. It seems to me that you have fallen into the common error that the aim of married life is the augmentation of the amenities of life. It is far from being so. Married life always means a decrease of the amenities of life, because it imposes new difficult duties upon man. The aim of married life, towards which such a strong feeling draws people that man, for the most part, cannot withstand it, is in no case an augmentation of the amenities of life, but the fulfillment by man of one of his callings -the continuation of the species.

... About your son's marriage I can say with full confidence that every kind of marriage is lawful and honorable only to the extent to which those who marry have decided on the mutual obligation to have children only by each other, quite apart from any kind of rites, and carry out the decision.

... You are, as I think, laboring under the customary and very harmful superstition that being in love is something akin to love, and that it is a very good felling; whereas it is a bad and a very harmful