Page:The Truth about Marriage.djvu/86

 should be pureminded, highminded, having a holy idea of the relationship, and seeing no evil in bodily contact.

A pure and holy love on the part of both man and woman will uplift it and make it heavenly. Young women should be taught that marriage is essentially chaste and holy, and is actually the highest and noblest of relationships in all the world.

Impure minds have made it evil. Pure minds have been taught that it was not in itself chaste. St. Paul is responsible for giving the world a totally wrong concept of its high character. A married woman is as chaste and pure as any virgin. St. Paul was carried away in his denunciations by the terrible evils of a dying world, so that he temporarily wrote of it unwisely. But he later saw that typified by Christ and the Church it was holy and beautiful and heavenly.

Marriage is often a failure because it is entered into merely from sex-urge, or from parental insistence, or from family or financial considerations, and sometimes it is a failure because it is entered into from an idealism which has not been instructed as to its exact nature.

Marriages are often failures because people are selfish, as already suggested, or cruel, or domineering, or set in their ways, or lazy, or have disagreeable