Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/159

Rh the priests. Let them content themselves with civil marriage, and after a possible divorce — do the same thing. No sensible woman ought any longer to consent to the self-degradation of permitting the desecrating hand of a priest to "bless" her love. Shame! These pestilent propagators of ignorance and disgust! Every bride must cast a doubt on her taste and her loveliness, if she can consent to let a priest bless, i.e., desecrate, her affection.

I call the attention of women to still another point. I maintain that piety, faith, in brief the occupation with the other world, that is with a world and with beings that have no existence, is just as pernicious to men's love towards women as the veneration of a ruler makes impossible all true relations among citizens. Whatever a man sends out to an imaginary being beyond the clouds in the shape of feeling, fancy, enthusiasm, "love," he withdraws from the real beings here who exist before his eyes, who associate with him, and to whom he ought to give his whole heart and mind. But if man will take what he has hitherto wasted on the skies back to the earth, into life, into mankind, then first he will become man in reality and learn to make of his fellow-men what they can and ought to be. Woman becomes his "God," and love his "heaven," and mankind his "immortality." Do not smile, ladies, but regard it as in sober earnest when I say to you: only