Incompatibility In Marriage

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN
MARRIAGE

BOOKS BY FELIX ADLER

Incompatibility in Marriage; and
Other Essays

The Reconstruction of the Spiritual
Ideal

An Ethical Philosophy of Life
The World Crisis and Its Meaning
Marriage and Divorce
The Moral Instruction of Children

INCOMPATIBILITY IN
MARRIAGE

By

FELIX ADLER

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXX LONDON

HUTTED DC TflE tTKITED STATES Of

CONTENTS

*AOB

I. INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE . . i

II. THE SPIRITUAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS

OLD AGE 16

HI. 'WOMAN'S SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE IN

MARRIAGE 29

IV. THE REVOLT AGAINST CONVENTIONAL

MORALITY 41

V. THE ETHICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS

ENEMIES 55

VI. THE STRAIN BETWEEN THE OLDER

GENERATION AND THE YOUNGER . 74

VII. THE ETHICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS

THE DEPARTED 91

NOTE

The addresses in this volume were delivered at
considerable intervals and under widely different
circumstances. No attempt was made by the editor
at revision with a view to uniformity in style or to
disturb the spontaneity of platform utterance*

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

INCOMPATIBILITIES are natural, are to be
expected; we do not spontaneously fall into tune
with each other; mutual adjustments must be
achieved consciously, do not happen of themselves.
In the case of parents and their sons and daughters,
the strain due to discrepancies is often severe
enough. But there is this mitigating circumstance,
that at the time when a son or daughter reaches
the age of manhood or womanhood, that is, when
he or she begins to take hold of life in good earnest,
the closeness of the relation is relaxed, a partial
separation at least occurs, and in consequence, the
^cuteness of the discrepancies is diminished while
in the case of marriage just the reverse takes place.
The man and the woman begin the marriage rela-
tion at a time when they enter on the most active
period of their lives, when they have attained a
more or less developed selfhood, and when the rela-
tion between them is bound to become closer and
closer, because of their joint responsibility for the
children and their mutual entanglement in each
other's fortune. The strain consequently becomes
more severe, unless harmony is effected.

One other difference is that the filial relation is

i

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

involuntary, if there are conflicting traits they could
not have been foreseen, while marriage is voluntary.
Why then are those who enter into this relation not
at greater pains to ascertain whether the prospect
be friction or peace? Some one the other day
drank from a bottle containing poison, thinking it
was medicine, and suffered terribly. Humanly
speaking, one could not help pitying the sufferer
but why did he drink poison ? Why did he not first
look at the label ? Why did those who complain so
vehemently, and ask the world's commiseration on
account of their infelicity why did they not look
at the label? Why did they not take the precaution
to find out whether they were really fitted for each
other? One obvious reason is that blind passion
takes the bit between its teeth and throws its rider,
reason. Passion is indiscriminating. It is a kind of
hunger, not selective of its object. But on this sen-
sual aspect, which explains a thousand and one
thoughtless, hasty marriages, it is unnecessary to
dwell.

Romantic love is a favorite subject of the poets,
and Emerson, in one of his prose poems, describes
very finely and eloquently the rapture of romantic
illusion, as well as its gradual wearing away. He
speaks of the nameless charm that glances from one
and another face and form, of the time in the life
of a youth or girl when a single note of one voice
could make the heart bound, when every trivial cir-
cumstance, a ribbon, a glove, associated with one

a

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

being, is treasured as priceless, when the veins of the
lover are filled, as it were, "with the blood of the
violet, of the clover, and of the lily," when all nature
becomes melodious with the inner music of the soul.
This kind of love is the deification of a person. But
when the person does not bear out the deification,
blemishes, defects, hindrances, disproportions ap-
pear, and are seen more and more distinctly, as the
veil of illusion becomes diaphanous threadbare.
At last they see each other as they are, and then
what happens ? Emerson says that they take a sort
of satisfaction in realizing that though they each
have their blemishes and faults, they can correct each
other without offense taken on either side. At last
they discover that the true end of marriage was not
the love by each of the other's personality, but
growth in what he calls virtue and wisdom. In the
meantime they are to resign themselves in good fel-
lowship to a cheerful, disengaged furtherance of
each other's designs, whether in presence or absence,
until the day comes when they are entirely released
from attachment each to the other, and they blend
with the one world soul.

I have not the space to criticize in detail Emer-
son's theory of love. The gist of it is that the aim
of our personal relations is to be put in training for
a wholly impersonal existence. To me, on the con-
trary, personality is the essential fact in life, and
growth into a more personalized, more distinct per-
sonality, is the chief aim to be served by the personal

3

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

relations. Emerson's description, however, of the
illusion or infatuation that veils the character of
a person of the opposite sex is true enough, and
together with the mist of passion, explains why
matches that were certainly not made in heaven are
made on earth why those whom no God has joined
together, those who never should have entered into
this relation, find themselves tied for better or
worse. For I may say in passing that the tie is for
better or worse, whether people will have it so or
not. It cannot ever be wholly rent; the surgical
remedy of divorce, while it may ameliorate, can
never wholly undo the consequences of the first
mistake.

I shall now present briefly certain other intrusive
factors that rise up between the man and woman in
marriage, and render the adjustment difficult. One
of them is the circumstance that the marriage unites
not only two individuals but two family connections,
and that the respective families or clans often clash
against each other, the young husband and wife hav-
ing the difficult role of shock absorbers. The one
clan may think itself superior to the other on account
of greater wealth, or superior social station, or pre-
tensions of some sort the other naturally resents
the pride of the former; and the poor shock-
absorbers, exposed to frequent jars of this kind,
will soon begin to jar against each other. Or the
intrusion of the family connection into the peace
of the new home may take on another form. A

4

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

conflict may arise between the attachment, say, of
the daughter to her mother, and her attachment to
her husband. The passage from the old home,
where she was a member, to the new home,
where she is to be mistress, and to the company
of a man who only a short time ago was a stranger
to her, has not been successfully accomplished. Or
the mother on her part is not wise, is jealous per-
haps of the man who now claims the major share of
her daughter's affection, or is secretly disappointed
that the girl has not made a match in her view
more suitable, more in accord with her own
ambitions.

Then, too, there is the tragic discord produced
by profound differences of religion, differences in
the attitude toward life and the world. A notable
French novel, u jean Barois," gives in the form of
letters and conversations a vivid account of such a
domestic tragedy. The husband, originally devout,
had become a freethinker, a libre penseur of the
French type. The wife, when she saw her husband
astray, was distressed, dismayed, unable to under-
stand. He on his part was willing to make con-
cessions, to accompany her to mass, to permit the
first child to be baptized. But this could not satisfy
her, he must not only be present but take part. He
pleaded that in self-respect, in 'intellectual honesty,
he could not join in the practices of a religion in
which he no longer believed. "But if I beg you to
do so!" was all she could retort. So matters went
on from bad to worse. She attributed his persist-

5

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

ence in his errors to sheer obstinacy. Finally, her
love for him changed into detestation, and one day,
after a vain argument, she broke out into the words,
"Tu me fats horreur!" Then followed the irre-
mediable break.

Intermarriage between persons who grew up in
different religious beliefs, and who have both out-
grown them, is not only permissible but, in my view,
advisable. But where the early faith is still deeply
rooted, the peril of a rupture can only be averted
by the most genuine loyalty. The free-thinking hus-
band especially is apt to deceive himself in this
matter. Because to him religious belief is of no
importance, or of little importance, and because he
is willing to let his wife believe as she sees fit, he
fatally overlooks the fact that she will not and
cannot, unless her love is deeper than her so-called
faith, let him think as he sees fit; and she cannot
help trying to convert him to her faith, or, if she
fails, to be miserable and unhappy and often to
turn from him.

A serious incompatibility exists, making accom-
modation difficult, when the one is highly educated
and the other relatively uneducated, when the one
has had the advantage of a wide cultural and social
background, and the other has lived in a narrow
social environment, with its provincialism, its petti-
nesses, its stubborn prejudices. Nothing is more
characteristic of culture than flexibility; nothing
more characteristic of the lack of culture than rigid-
ity. In the past one would have taken the intellec-

6

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

tual man, the scientist, the author, married to a
mentally inferior woman as an example. Nowa-
days, when women go to college, it is as often as
not the man who is the mental inferior, and the
woman the superior.

And in addition to all these general causes, there
are the individual discrepancies, the traits of one
that do not match with those of the other, or faults,
like short temper, or arbitrariness, or excessive love
of finery and pleasure, or slovenliness; and cruelty,
too, whether raw and palpable, or cynical and wrapt
in polite phrases. And the wonder is that there are
only three hundred odd thousand divorces in the
United States, that the divorce mills in Reno are not
even more active, that the annulments of marriage
are not more numerous, that experimentalism in
the sex relation is not more frequent among the
young, that in a word the prospects of the. family
and the conjugal bond are not still more dubious
than they are actually. ^

There are two main causes that have prevented
the more general debacle of marriage. One of them
has acted in the past and is still operative to-day,
and will, we may well believe, continue to make for
permanence in the future. The other acted in the
past but is no longer operative in the present, and
its place must be supplied. The former of these two
causes is the maternal and paternal feeling for the
child, a powerful, human, ineradicable impulse. And
the other, no longer operative now, is the obliga-

7

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

1*

tion felt by married people to preserve the existing
social order. To serve the social order meant for
the legitimate son to succeed to the father's place,
to inherit the estate, carry on the existing social
tradition. For the sake of legitimate succession,
the monogamic family had to be maintained, hus-
band and wife remaining together. No matter what
the friction between them, their aversions must be
overcome, since promiscuity, or frequent divorce,
clouds the succession. The flaw in this conception
of marriage, namely, that it implied fidelity on the
part of the woman but not equally on the part of
the man, I need not stop here to discuss. The point
I make is that a social motive served to overcome
incompatibility; and what I say now is that a higher
social motive must be substituted, to cooperate with
parental attachment to children, to reenforte and
enlighten that parental attachment which, while I
believe it to be perennial, is itself in the present
transition period, relaxing somewhat.

What higher social, let me rather say, spiritual
motive, then, can be presented? What can the ethi-
cal view of life contribute toward the solution of this
problem of all problems? I have sometimes been
accused of indifference to the sufferings of people
who are shut up in uncongenial companionship so
closely that they cannot get away from each other.
I am not indifferent to suffering; I would certainly
extend relief from pain wherever possible. But I do
not agree with those who think that where there

8

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

is pain there must be relief, for whom pain is the
last impossible thing. There are interests more com-
pelling even than the happiness of a man or a
woman. In the olden days the imperative interest
was to keep society going as it is, to provide suc-
cessors, to fill the vacant places. To-day, to my
mind, the imperative, super-eminent interest is to
contribute to the progress of society toward its
spiritual goal.

I may stop here for a moment to explain. The
fundamental fault, as I take it, is in the way people
enter into marriage either giddily, just drifting
into it, without any clear ideas as to what it is to
mean for them for the rest of their days (now
you cannot get anything fine from a relation unless
you know beforehand what you have a right to
expect; you may not get it then, but you will cer-
tainly fail to get it if you have no definite objective
in mind) or they enter this partnership, and it
is a partnership, with wholly false expectations as
to what they ought to be and do for each other.
People think of the stretch of life, the thirty or forty
years which they spend together as if it were wholly
their life, to do with what they please. They do
not think of these thirty or forty years as the short
section of a line stretching backward and forward
beyond them. They do not think t)f the stream of
life that passes through them as coming out of its
sources in the far-off origins of life, and as destined
to sweep onward into the sea of life the stream to
be purified, the current to be intensified in power

9

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

as it passes through them. In former days there
was at least recognized an overarching purpose in
marriage. | Marriage was regarded as an instrumen-
tality for a social end.} There was an awe-inspiring
presence that brooded over the fireside, something
greater than the pleasure and pain of the couple,
something that had the authority to override discrep-
ancy and demand accommodation. This something
was the preservation of the status quo, including
the precious things which all the earlier genera-
tions had achieved. Marriage to-day is to be ethi-
cally conceived as an institution for extending and
enhancing the work of civilization, for ennobling,
exalting the human type in oneself and in one's
children. Marriage is the channel in which the
higher life of the human race is to be purified and
intensified. \

But purify and intensify are figurative terms;
what is their practical application? What do they
imply as to the conduct of the man towards the
woman and the woman towards the man? Briefly,
that they shall seek to develop, the one the best
possible manhood in the man, the other the best
possible womanhood in the woman. Make yourself
the kind of a man that will bring out in your
wife the best that is latent in her; make yourself
the kind of a woman that will bring out in your
husband what is best, most manly, in him. And
certain conditions may be mentioned that are essen-
tial to the performance of this office.

I. The exclusion of egotism. I do not mean

10

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

merely the brutal egotism that seeks to dominate
and to crush the will of the other. I mean also the
mutual egotism, the kind of give and take relation
where each still seeks happiness, but seeks it indi-
rectly at the hands of the other. No; there should
be, as I think, entire consecration to one object
to bring out, as the saying goes, "the statue in the
block," the word that has never been articulated,
that most exquisite thing, the distinctive personality
in the other.

Of what the best in the woman, the essential
womanliness in her, is, we have glorious hints. We
know that it implies a certain graciousness that is
the radiance of an inner grace; a certain motherli-
ness, even towards us adults; a certain faculty of
giving .peace.

Du hist die Ruh

Der Friede mild

in the highest type bf woman a certain sibylline
quality, instinct with divination. At present new
ideals are forming. To the attributes mentioned
others are being added : a developed mentality, the
intellectual power, long neglected, challenged into
serious activity; a wide outlook on citizenship and
on social progress. All this and more will enter
into the new ideal of womanliness. And the service
which the husband may render his wife is to aid
her in striving toward this ideal, just as, conversely,
the woman shall help the man in his advance toward
essential manhood, meaning the apprentice to be-

iz

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

come master in his vocation, and essentially just in
all relations. The sacredness and the zest of the
conjugal relation consists precisely in this the
incessant quest of the elusive best in each.

2. There is involved also the principle and the
recognition of mutual dependence. Many a mar-
riage is wrecked because, though the man is willing
to do for the wife what is ordinarily required of
him, to support her in comfort, even in luxury (per-
haps in too great luxury), he has failed to feel and
to make her feel his dependence on her. Even the
man of superior education is dependent on his wife
though she be inferior to him in education, in cer-
tain important particulars. His vocational col-
leagues, no doubt, are able to rate him better on his
professional side, but in respect to what counts most,
his personality, the kind of man he is becoming in
and through his professional work, woman, gifted
by nature to read personality, is the better critic and
judge. Especially in regard to the work they do for
their offspring are the two dependent on each other.

3. And again, there is this other spiritual prin-
ciple involved, that in marriage more than in any
other relation, one has to avoid the error, I had
almost said the crime, of putting the mask of final-
ity on the face of one's companion, and assuming
that no change is to be expected, that there are no
undeclared potentialities to be hoped for. "I know
my wife like a book*' that is the fatal mistake. No
one knows another absolutely least of all the soul
that travels at one's side.

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

It follows from what has been said that a new
statement of the social purpose of marriage is the
prime need. The social purpose of it can no longer
be defined as the maintenance of the status quo, the
securing of legitimate successors to fill the ranks as
they are left vacant. The social purpose of mar-
riage requires, on the basis of the ethical equality of
the sexes, their unity in the advancement of the
human type, first through their influence upon one
another, and then through their joint influence upon
their offspring. And to give this new direction to
the thought of marriage, better to inform those
who enter into it as to what they ought to expect
from it, is perhaps the best service which those who
are interested in the improvement of mankind can
render.

Incompatibilities, I repeat, are natural. They can
and must be overcome. Once let it be understood
that incompatibility is a cause for parting company,
and the evil will onlybe aggravated. Thereafter,
every slight disagreement will be magnified and
exaggerated into an insurmountable difficulty, from
which relief can only be obtained by running away.
Once let the social purpose of marriage be lost out
of sight, let the institution be published as one that
exists only or fundamentally for the "self-expres-
sion" of the man and the woman/ and the most pow-
erful incentive for transcending differences and
creating harmony will be absent.

At present the flood of divorce is mounting higher
and higher, and cannot be stemmed by any external

13

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

means there must be an internal change although
some of the worst scandals, at least the scandal, for
instance, of the woman who lately divorced her thir-
teenth husband, should in very decency be put an
end to. Men and women being as they are, divorce
in extreme cases will have to be granted, though
for my part, I still stand, as a counsel of perfection,
for separation rather than divorce, with the door
left open always for reunion. I think of the worst
case. I think of a person who has a fine view of
life, and who is married to one who turns out to be
ignoble, flippant, or even base. Nevertheless, I do
not see how any one who has taken the hand of
another in wedlock, and who understands what he
has thereby charged himself with, the entire care of
another human being, body and soul I say I do
not see how such a one can cut off his partner, any
more than he could deliberately cut off a limb of his
own how he can set such a one adrift, how he can
ever, in honor, devolve from himself the responsi-
bility he has assumed*

Fortunately, we need not dwell only on the fail-
ures. Fortunately, there are many successful mar-
riages, successful not only in the ordinary sense, but
more or less spiritually successful. Emerson, in de-
scribing the ultimate stages of conjugal attachment,
what he conceives to be its decline, says: "At last
they discover that all that which first drew them
together, those once sacred features, that magical
charm, was deciduous, like the scaffolding with which

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

the house is built. 9 ' And the true office of these
personal relations he thinks is to detach the persons
from one another, to put them into training for a
kind of impersonal, pantheistical continuance. I do
not for one moment subscribe to this anti-climax.
Emerson, exquisite in many of his insights, has here
missed the essential truth. "All," he says, "that
once drew them together, those once sacred fea-
tures" are they then sacred no longer because the
bloom has fled from the cheeks, and time has writ
his wrinkled scripture on the once smooth brow?
Does not the eye remain, the sanctuary in which
burns the light of the soul, a light that fails not?
And the charm, is it no longer magical? Has the
spell that held them lost its effect? Together they
have traveled the road of life, and remembrance
now holds them close, remembrance of many hours
of ineffable felicity, of a sense of union as near to
bliss as mortal hearts can realize, of high aspirations
pursued in common, of sorrows shared sacramen-
tal sorrows. And now, nearing the end, hand in
hand, they look forth upon the wide universe, and
the love which they found in themselves and still
find there to the last, becomes to them a pledge of
the vaster love that moves beyond the stars and
suns.

II

THE SPIRITUAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS
OLD AGE

IT will doubtless be remembered how great a
discussion was aroused some years ago by Sir
William Osier's disparagement of the later years of
life, in his "Counsels and Ideals." Much of the at-
tention which his pronouncements received was un-
questionably due to what may be called the prevailing
physicism of our age. I do not say materialism
because materialism is that now rather discredited
system of philosophy which avers that material phe-
nomena are cause and mental phenomena effect.
Physicism simply emphasizes the importance of the
physical side of life and urges, not its causal relation,
but a strict parallelism between man's physical and
mental strength. On the basis of physicism it is
assumed that when a man is physically at the top of
his bent, he is so mentally as well ; that as the body
waxes the mind waxes, and as the body wanes the
mind wanes. It is no doubt this assumption of phys-
icism mat underlies Dr. Osier's bold and unqualified
statement that the work of the world in literature
and science is done by men between twenty and forty;
for he can hardly have based such a statement on a
sufficient number of carefully collated facts.

16

OLD AGE

Now there is much truth in this doctrine of par-
allelism. Mens sana in corpore sano a sound mind
in a sound body is not an idle proverb. It is true
that bodily states affect the mind. But the parallel-
ism is not perfect, for it is also true that some of the
greatest intellectual feats have been achieved by per-
sons whose bodies were diseased. Disease affects
the mind, but the mind also affects disease; and we
have no reason to consider ourselves merely the
slaves of our bodily conditions; to capitulate when
the hair begins to silver, and elasticity to lessen ; to
read our doom in signs of physical decay, as if, of
necessity, the physical decline meant mental decline
also. We have the mental power to defy untoward
physical condition, just as we have the mental power
to control not indeed all but some diseases. It is
this physical view that has given more weight than
is justly their due to the utterances of our author.

What are these utterances? What about the opin-
ions themselves ? Dr. Osier says flatly that the work
of the world has been done by men under forty. He
speaks of "la crise de quarante ans," the crisis of
the fortieth year. He says that the work of civiliza-
tion has been done between the third and fourth dec-
ades, that the period between twenty and forty
means progress, creation, production, and the period
between forty and seventy means slowness and con-
servatism. He says that the life of a teacher should
be divided into three epochs up to twenty, study;
from twenty to forty, investigation; from forty to

17

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

sixty, profession, and at sixty, not chloroform, but
retirement on a double allowance which is a very
different matter. But he states without qualifications
that the work of the world has been done by men
under forty.

This assertion is a sweeping one, including science
and literature, art and government, and executive
functions generally. It seems to me perfectly plain
that in this extension at all events the statement is
unfounded. In literature certainly some of the great-
est work of the world has been done by men no
longer in the prime of life. Dante's "Divine Com-
edy" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are the two
greatest epics of the modern world and both were
written late in life. The Paradiso was written when
Dante was past fifty-three. In Milton's career we
find two periods of blossoming, the springtime and
the autumn. The springtime gave us "Comus,"
"L' Allegro," etc. Then came the long interval in
which Milton fought the literary battles of Crom-
well and the Commonwealth, a period of political
pamphleteering. And then between fifty and sixty-
three he produced his greatest work, "Paradise
Lost" and "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Ag-
onistes."

If we think of the great artists, our minds will at
once revert to Michelangelo, whose "Last Judg-
ment" was painted. in his old age, and who at sixty
experienced a sudden inundation of youthful passion
and power. To him, as to Goethe, there came a
sudden renewal of the springtime. A pure, profound

18

OLD AGE

love for Vittoria Colonna unsealed new possibilities
in the mighty painter's nature, and then he gave the
world his sonnets. Again in the last period of his
life he became an architect. He was in four arts
distinguished painting, sculpture, architecture and
poetry; and he was between eighty and ninety when
he remodeled the designs of St. Peter's and attained
his great eminence as an architect. Titian, we know,
accepted and carried out commissions up to the time
of his death, in his ninety-ninth year, and even then
he was carried off, not by old age, but by the plague.
In philosophy, certainly, some of the greatest
work of the world has been produced by men beyond
la crise de quarante ans. Plato thinks that a man
ought not to begin to write philosophy until he is
fifty; and among the great German philosophers
there are no i ames that stand out more illustrious
than those of Leibnitz and Immanuel Kant. Leib-
nitz published his Theodicee and the sketch of the
"Monadology" in i^rio and 1714, in his sixty-fourth
and sixty-eighth year, while the immortal Kant, who
was the founder of modern German philosophy,
published his three great Critiques between 1781
and 1790 that is to say, between his fifty-seventh
and sixty-sixth years. They were the fruit of those
very decades which Dr. Osier characterizes as the
conservative period of life. So we meet with crea-
tion of the highest order between fifty and seventy,
and in the case of the artists even between eighty
and ninety. In Kant's case, not only did the orig-
inality of his age exceed that of his prime, but his

19

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

radicalism also far outstripped in its boldness the
opinions of his youth.

I am not opposing a sweeping assertion of my
own to that of Dr. Osier. I do not say that the
work of the world is done by men over fifty, as he
says it is done by men under forty. I simply say
that some men blossom early and some blossom late,
and that there is no reason why, if one has blos-
somed early, he should not experience a second
bloom. Certainly in some lines of work the weight
of evidence seems to be in favor of the later period.

"But these are the illustrious men/' some one may
say. To be sure; but the great creative work has
been done by the few, and if we can point out a few
of these few, who have done the greater part of
their work in the latter period of their lives, such a
reply is certainly pertinent. But leaving aside the
illustrious and speaking of average men, I should
like to point out that there is one kind of excellence
which is not likely to be attained by the average
man before he has passed the meridian, that is, the
excellence which depends upon judgment. \ Judg-
ment, which Aristotle extols as the lamp that lights
men's footsteps in the precarious path of right, is
important in all departments of life. j The attitude
of the scientific experimenter depends upon keen-
ness of observation and the faculty of rapid think-
ing, as well as on judgment ; but I should not be at
all surprised if it were found that those operations
of the mind which depend upon judgment reach

20

OLD AGE

their appggejn the latter period of life. At any
rate, that kind of mental excellence which depends
upon judgment is not likely to be attained early;
and it is judgment that is supremely needed in prac-
tical life and in conduct, which Matthew Arnold
calls three-fourths of life. That quality which is
needed for three-quarters of life is a very important
quality, and if it appear only in the latter part of
life, we must admit that the importance of the latter
part of life not only equals but perhaps surpasses
that of the earlier part.

Judgment is the ability to read a given situation,
to interpret it, and to decide on the appropriate
course of action. The man of judgment is the man
who, when placed face to face with a certin set of cir-
cumstances, will at once recall similar circumstances,
and rapidly note the points of difference between the
previous and the present group of circumstances,
and remembering the course of action which was
adequate on the previous occasion, will quickly
decide whether it be adequate on the present
occasion or whether it needs to be modified and
how. It stands to reason when that judgment
depends on the richness and variety of previous
experience, on one's having at command a store
of elements from which to select for compari-
son, and it is evident that richness and variety of
experience are gained only in the course of time,
judgment cannot well be the possession of young
men. It is judgment that distinguishes the seasoned
man from the novice, and it cannot be acquired from

21

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

study of textbooks and formulas, but only from
experience.

Thus far I have spoken only of mental qualities,
but I wish to add a word about the moral qualities.
The picture implied in the current conception of life
is that of a hill with its upward and downward
slopes. From youth to middle age we ascend, then
reach the top, and after that descend. Our step
becomes faltering and heavy on the downward slope
memory fails, the complexion is marred with
wrinkles, the fair outline of the form is shrunken or
passes into shapeless obesity, the mind relaxes, and
at last we totter and stumble into a hole at the bot-
tom of the hill, which men call the grave. This is
the current conception. Instead of that, the concep-
tion which I would present is that of a series of ter-
races, each higher than the last. From age to age,
through ascent following on ascent, rising from
power to power, from glory to glory, at last we do
not stumble into a hole, but pass as it were into the
open heaven.

If even a brief view of the mental life of man has
given some countenance to this daring pictorial in-
novation, yet it is on the moral life that I chiefly
found my conception; for morally we become, or
may become, better from year to year, from period
to period.

Old age is friendly to moral development in vari-
ous ways. In the first place, the dogs of passion
cease to bark; the fever that has burnt so long

22

OLD AGE

abates* As Sophocles replied, when commiserated on
his extreme age, seeing that he could no longer
enjoy the pleasures of youth: "On the contrary I
believe that old age is my friend in that it has lib-
erated me from a vicious and savage master who
has disturbed my peace." By this vicious and savage
master he meant the carnal appetites. Old age
means peace. It is also friendly to a kind of disin-
terestedness. It is apt to free us from that other
despot, the selfish self, and to induce broader inter-
est in children and children's children; to enhance
our ability of entering vicariously into the pleasures
and sufferings of others.

But there is another reason why old age is depre-
ciated, namely, that we do not seriously enough be-
lieve the oft-repeated dictum that "being is more
than doing." Old age is the time of being, while
middle age and youth are the time of doing, and if
one takes seriously the thought that being is more
than doing, he will appreciate that in this respect
old age is more valuable than youth. But as a rule
we only confess with the lips that this is true, while
we really rate people according to the things they
accomplish.

Doing is indeed important, but only in so far as a
man becomes something in the course of his doing,
the doing being the matrix that shapes the being.
All our doing is worthless of itself. In the sight of
infinity what are the fortunes we accumulate, the
bridges we build, the books we write? What do all
these doings signify, these tracings on the beach

23

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

which the waves of eternity will obliterate? They
are as nothing except as they react upon us and
make us something.

The spiritual life is engendered in us through
doing, but is manifested in being; this is the point of
view upon which the honor and appreciation of old
age depend. If we take this view, old age will ap-
pear as the time when one can become beautiful
inwardly, realizing an inner worth. The aged may
become radiant presences in our households. By
their freedom from disturbing passions, their unsel-
fish, vicarious joys and pains, the fine irony with
which they treat their wrinkled faces and shrunken
bodies, they can win an inner worth, a refinement
of spirit which makes them beautiful in our eyes.

We enter upon life thinking of the whole of it as
our prospective estate; after a while we diminish
our claim, we select a specialty; and then within the
specialty a still narrower field, a specialty within the
specialty; then we take our places as workers; and
then after a time we withdraw, and more and more
withdraw from life, until we have left its activities
behind us. The whole of life is a succession of
withdrawals and renunciations, and each new renun-
ciation, if it be accomplished in the right spirit, adds
a little to our inward worth, a line of spiritual beauty
to our souls. It is calmness and peace, the lulling of
the passions and freedom from them, the liberation
from the persistent thought of self and the ability
to identify one's self with the young life that is grow-

24

OLD AGE

ing up around us, and to get new youth, as it were,
by that identification it is these things that make
one finer. The outer shell decays, but the inner self
does not decay. The outer garment becomes thread-
bare and rent, but the soul looks out from behind
those hollow eyes and the mask of the wrinkled face,
the soul intact, the center of life, more concen-
trated, more luminous than in the prime of vigor.

I say this is possible. I do not say it must be so.
There are plenty of old men who are no better than
old fools. Many there are who decline and decay,
and become miserable and fretful and more and
more intolerable to others. Some time ago I gave
an address on suffering, and an eminent physician
criticized my assertion that suffering sweetens men,
saying that he, in his experience, had found that suf-
fering sours people. I do not dispute the fact that
suffering often sours; I merely contend that it is
within our power to have it otherwise. We have
the power to make ourselves or to mar ourselves.

And perhaps the greatest of all the means of giv-
ing refinement and spiritual beauty to one's life, par-
adoxical as it may seem, is to do with the greatest
zeal the little than we can do. This sounds contra-
dictory to what I have just said in disparagement of
doing, except as it reacts on being. Why do the
little that remains with the greatest zeal ? Because
by persisting in doing the little we illustrate the high-
est quality in us, the willingness to serve. Just as
a little child when it comes to you with the gift it
has made, pleases you because of its intention,

as

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

pleases because of the loving spirit in its little loving
heart, though the gift itself be worthless a little
kindergarten weaving, an impossible pen-wiper- 1
the gift does please and warm your heart, because
it shows the intent to please so, when we approach
old age, we can still place our gifts upon the altar,
and thereby show our intent to serve, which is more
than the service, and our faith and trust in the power
in things that will make perfect our imperfections.

I admire the scholar in the prime of life, whose
books are on the shelves of every library, and whose
name is on every tongue ; but I revere more the spent
scholar, who uses the little daylight that remains to
add some last slight contribution to the stock of
knowledge. I revere him more, though I may ad-
mire the other more. There is nothing more pa-
thetic and nothing more beautiful than this persistent
bringing of one's little gift. I admire the great
industrial worker who moves the world forward:
I revere the spent and worn-out worker who insists
upon remaining in harness, not because he believes
that he will drop by the way if he gives up work,
but because he would lend his little strength toward
pulling the car of progress forward. I admire the
man and woman, in whatever station, who, with a
smile on their faces, persevere in doing their little
best, not because they fail to perceive that it is little,
but because they so love the best.

There is to me no more affecting passage in Ho-
mer's "Odyssey" than those communings between
husband and wife, when at last, after twenty years

26

OLD AGE

of separation, they stood face to face with each
other in the silence of the wedding chamber. In
those first communings, the man and the woman who
had had twenty years of their married life cut out,
spoke with one another of what was left of life; and
the man told her of the trials that still remained, yet
expressed the hope that at the last there might be
peace. And Penelope replied in the melodious phrase
which Homer has lent her: "If indeed it is true
that the gods can so transmute old age that it shall
be the best thing, then indeed will there be a final
escape for men from all their evil. Yes, if it is true
that the gods can so transform old age that it shall
be the best age, then indeed the whole of life will lie
before us like a great white road, and the last years
the years of decay also will be blest, for on them
also the sunshine lies."

It is this audacious undertaking that I have at-
tempted in the name of the gods this morning, to
transmute old age so that it shall seem the best age,
so that it shall seem the last terrace of the terraces,
the height of heights, the topmost summit, from
which men can gaze into the open sky.

We live in a time in which old people are not con-
sidered as they ought to be. We have forgotten
what the privileges of old age are, and the lessons
which old age can teach; and worst of all the aged
themselves often accept this opinion of themselves,
as mere cumberers of the earth, creatures whom it
were better to shelve. The change must come first

27

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

in the feeling of the aged themselves. They must
put forward their claim to the honor which is their
due, for their own sake, and the sake of human so-
ciety. "Before the grey head thou shalt rise," says
the Bible. Where honor and regard are denied to the
old, the tenderest pieties of life are apt to be slighted
and the delicate bloom of morality is rudely brushed
aside. Even in those cases when the extreme of old
age is reached, even when the last stage of feeble-
ness sets in, even when the mental spark barely glim-
mers, if it glimmers at all, even there, where nothing
remains, or almost nothing, of the former pride
of manhood even there, the love and the regard
should remain. We are still bound by every feel-
ing of gratitude to remember the source out of
which we have sprung, and the benefits that have
been so lavishly bestowed upon us; we are still
obligated by every feeling of humanity that is in
us to approach with holy reverence the shrine from
which the god has departed, and to cherish and re-
spect the human ruin over which hangs with a sol-
emn lingering beauty the glory of other days.

Ill

WOMAN'S SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE IN
MARRIAGE

A RADICAL illusion that often leads to ship-
wreck in marriage is the assumption that mar-
riage is a state of which mutual happiness, instead of
mutual training, is the ot)ject7training, indeed, under
the most felicitous conditions where the choice has
been fortunate, but training in any case. The illusion
consists in supposing that we are to enjoy each other's
perfections in a state of delight, keen and rapturous
at first, milder but still marked later on, instead of
our regarding marriage as a state in which, through
the influence of the sex nature, in the nobler view of
it, on either side, we are to win from one another
such adumbrations of perfection as finite humanity
is capable of.

But let me try to be more explicit as to the essence
of this educative process. What is it, we ask, that
woman can contribute toward the development of
man, and conversely? I am not now speaking oi
the woman outside the home, the woman in the pro-
fessions. It is said that one-eighth of the total num-
ber of women remain celibate, but seven-eighths do
not I am here concerned with those whose life is
spent within the home, but whose interests assuredly

29

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

should not, therefore, be restricted to the home,
whose mental outlook should embrace the whole of
life. I am concerned with wifehood and mother-
hood, in respect to which the demand is becoming
more and more exigent that it be considered as a
true vocation. Now a vocation is an occupation
which is dedicated to a specific social service, and
is pursued with an understanding of the principles
which are involved in that service. Are wifehood
and motherhood capable of becoming a vocation
in this sense? The presence of the child is the cap-
ital fact; the purpose of human marriage, as distinct
from the joinings of the lower organisms, is to per-
petuate the spiritual life upon earth in its human
vehicles, and not only to perpetuate, but enhance it
from generation to generation. Even when the
child is subnormal, the task of the parents should be
to bring it up as far as possible to the level of the
normal, to advance it farther than it could possibly
reach if left without their scrupulous care. But in
the case of normal children the object is so to evoke
their spiritual possibilities as to bring mankind for-
ward, in them, a step beyond the attainment of the
past. And in order to enhance the spiritual life of
offspring it is necessary to enhance the spiritual life
of the father and mother. It is spirit that acts on
spirit; it is the personality that evokes personality.
It is the atmosphere created in the home it is what
a man and a woman are in process of becoming that
tells. It is their life that makes its silent but search-
ing appeal to the hidden life in the young. The aim

30

MARRIAGE

of the woman in marriage, then, should be to call
out the distinctive personality of the man, and the
converse applies to the man, with a view to eliciting
by their action and reaction on one another, the per-
sonal qualities that are latent in their offspring.

Let me elaborate somewhat what I mean. Every
occupation has an ideal and a commonplace side to
it. It may be carried on in a lofty or in a mean
spirit. The ideal side turns out to be in every case
the social side. The influence that woman at her
best can bring to bear upon man is to socialize him
in his work, to give him the vision and the incentive
to follow his calling, not in a detached way, but in
such a way as to do justice to its broad reactions on
the life of society. Woman at her best is the guard-
ian, I had almost said the incarnation, of the jjjacial
spirit. I do not mean merely that she excels as a
social worker, although she does that social settle-
ments in the main are carried on by women. But in
a larger sense I conceive that woman is the repre-
sentative of the social spirit, or rather of the cosmic
principle of unity which in the human sphere we call
the social spirit. The social spirit has a cosmic
background. Goethe took account of this when he
penned his famous eulogy on the divinifying influ-
ence of woman. In Revelation we read of the woman
who is "clothed with the sun." At her best she is
a sun; she exercises that kind of attractive force
which creates a system out of the lives that revolve
about her. Her special office, if the paradox be al-

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

lowed, is to stand for the general point of view, for
life in its wholeness. She is the factor of integra-
tion in human society as man chiefly is the factor of
differentiation.

Every calling can be regarded in a detached way,
and that is the commonplace way of looking at it.
Owing to the excessive specialization and subdivision
of labor it is apt to be the man's way. He is prone
to think of his calling as a means of private gain.
Or, if he takes a somewhat more unselfish view, he
will seek to promote the isolated interests of his
calling the medical, the legal, the artistic but still
without having regard to the reactions of his calling
on society as a whole. This latter is the truly social
point of view.

For example, the narrow view of business is that
of the merchant or manufacturer who, while render-
ing a certain service to society, is interested predom-
inantly in the pecuniary profit which he can derive
from it. To him, the profit is the product, the serv-
ice the by-product. But from the social standpoint
the opposite is the case. While the merchant is en-
titled to a living, and will almost inevitably, if he
renders a valuable service, obtain it, the service itself
is that which should count in his total life as a hu-
man being. And it is the claim of the total life that
the woman should urge.

Further, the service involves not only honest val-
ues in the product, but respect to the human factors
engaged in the work of production. The social serv-
ice rendered by an enlightened person in business

32

MARRIAGE

to-day, the service to others and to his own higher
self, consists in his contriving to come into human
relations with the human beings who work with him
and under him. And one of the indispensable pre-
requisites of such relations is that the employer of
human beings should actually know the conditions
in which ttyey live. In this respect the wife of the
employer has a great and beneficial role to play. She
can be on the social side of his calling not only an
inspirer, a revealer, aiding him by her vision, but an
active helper and sharer of his moral obligations
toward his employees. The lady of leisure, accord-
ing to the aristocratic tradition, is supposed to be
far removed from the dust of business. The chival-
rous husband may not intrude upon her things so
vulgar as business cares. This false ideal, while it
still lingers, is rapidly passing away. The influence
of the woman who is married to an employer should
be to aid him in developing excellence beyond that
which he originally possessed by emphasizing the
social side of his calling. Could there be the child-
labor that exists in this country to-day if the wives
of employers realized that it is their special function
to see, and help the men to see, the social side of
their calling?

The same is true in regard to all other profes-
sions. Every one has both a social and a detached
aspect. The social demand on the lawyer of to-day
is that he shall beware of commercializing his pro-
fession. The demand is for a higher ethical code

33

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

within the profession, in the relation of the lawyer
to his clients, but also, and much more insistently,
for a higher ethical conception of the relation of
the lawyer to legislation. For his is the prerogative
and the obligation to bring together those often
mutually repugnant elements, the social conscience
and the hard and fast legal machinery, so as to make
the latter more flexible to the social conscience,
quicker to follow its abiding impulses, more prompt
to mirror its increasing light. The wife of the
lawyer to-day at her best is no longer to be a person
too ignorant or too indifferent to comprehend the
problems with which her husband has to deal. She
may not and need not be a legal expert. It is her
special function to stand for the general point of
view, and were she lost in the intricacies of detail
she could not perform this function. But the de-
mands of the social life, on the one hand, and the
large principles of the law on the other, she should
be able to master. She should hold the torch that
guides the expert, overweighted as he is apt to be
by his expert knowledge, on the upward way.

In medicine the social side, that is, the point of
union between the aims of the profession and the
life of the community, is being emphasized as never
before. The profession of the physician seems to be
undergoing an evolution in three directions : greater
attention to the influence of psychic conditions on
bodily health and disease, greater attention to the
hygienic and sanitary prevision in order to forestall

34

MARRIAGE

disease, and far greater attention to the social con-
dition of the majority of the poor who throng the
dispensaries for relief.

Again, the religious teacher to-day often has an
agonizing problem to solve. He is bound to teach
the truth as he sees it, even after a change of con-
viction, but he may also have to consider the needs
of a family dependent on him, the time-honored
traditions of his church and friends whom he may
grieve by an avowed change of belief. Here again
it is the social side of the calling that marks out the
ideal side. I refer to the incalculable social value in
a community of men who are known to be absolutely
sincere in the matter of religious belief. They purify
the spiritual life of the whole of society. And a
wife, she who has to endure the sacrifices consequent
upon her husband's steadfast sincerity, can bring
her best womanhood to bear by encouraging and
supporting the man who chooses the hard but en-
nobling alternative. Many a woman has acted thus
in such a situation, and saved the soul of the man
whose business it is to save souls.

These are illustrations of the service which
woman at her best renders to man, in virtue of the
cosmic principle of which she is the vehicle; and a
man in a sense repays this service, when at his best,
by enlarging her mental horizon, strengthening her
mental grasp, by infusing greater intellectuality into
her love, so that it shall be not a mere glowing fire,
emitting heat without light, but a radiant thing that
illumines even while it imparts vital warmth. It is

35

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

said that women are interested in persons and not in
abstract ideas or general principles. This may be
true at present, but if so it is a tendency to be cor-
rected; women need to apprehend general situations
and principles if they are to exercise the socializing
function that has been described. They need to have
a large outlook on society. They need to be well
grounded in the general principles of economics, of
social science, of history, besides receiving at least a
general training in the physical sciences, and in liter-
ature, psychology and the like. The largest foun-
dation in culture is indispensable to a woman who
would be not only a sunny presence, but a central,
solar influence in her environment.

It has been said that woman is, as a rule, inca-
pable of taking into account more than a few per-
sons; that she is disposed excessively to narrow the
circle within which she lives and moves, and, in con-
nection with this trait, that she is a born conserva-
tive, opposed to innovation of any kind, in religion,
in manners, customs, etc. For all that is finest and
most genuinely womanly in her craves for harmonious
relations, and innovation of any kind threatens to
break up the harmonies of life. If this be so, it fol-
lows that she needs to be subjected to the reaction
upon her of the more adventurous and aggressive
spirit of man, who at his best seeks ever to encounter
or create the new, in order that she, in turn, may be
impelled to open out the circle of her interests more
largely, to enrich and diversify the elements which
she undertakes to compose and reconcile.

36

MARRIAGE

I have thus far spoken of the woman in relation
to the calling of the man. Is she then to be a mere
onlooker, a mere critic? If she were that, a critic
in the sense in which poetry is said to be a criticism
of life, her ministry would surely not deserve to be
disparaged in comparison with those who are en-
gaged in the actual struggle of life! It is a curious
provincialism to imagine that only he is a doer who
brings things to pass in palpable fashion, as if the
bricklayer or mason were a more real doer than the
architect who creates the design. If woman were
simply the critic, her office would be not negligible,
but, on the contrary, sublime. She would rank with
the poet, only that in virtue of her keen interest in
the man and the child, she would be sketching the
ideal of particular lives, she would be writing the
poetry of particular persons.

But indeed she also takes an active part, she also
has a definite calling always has had, and always
will have. I have said that every relation in life
should be educative ; it should be added that there are
a great many different kinds of educators. There is
the school teacher, the professor in the college, the
lecturer, the teacher of music. All of these have to
do with the training of some one faculty, or set of
faculties. Even in the school, though we aim to
train the whole child, we never can arrive at doing
so without the cooperation of the home, if only for
the reason that the whole child is not in evidence in
the school, only a part of the day being set aside for
school experience, and only a part of the child's life

37

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

being uncovered to the eyes of the teacher. It is
the privilege of the woman, the mother, to be the
one all-round educator of the next generation. The
whole child in infancy is in her charge, and later
it is for her to select the right school, to see to it
that her individual child is not sacrificed to the exi-
gencies of the school mechanism, that the life outside
the school and in the school are made concordant.
She is to see to it that all the rays of influence that
reach the child shall converge upon a single purpose,
the awakening of the soul, the development of a dis-
tinctive and worthy personality in the child.

And later on this spiritual office still remains hers.
Childhood passes into adolescence, the years of
adolescence also pass how quickly! and presently
there is a family of adults, and with each new stage
of development new mental and moral problems
arise among the constituents of the family: the prob-
lems of adolescence, the problems of early manhood
and womanhood. New discords break through also ;
possibly there appear strains of heredity latent be*
fore. In any case, the characteristic service of the
woman is still, and more than ever, in demand. Her
function does not cease with child-rearing, when
so-called education is finished, solfiat she were then
at liberty to give her entire attention to politics and
the clubs. She is still needed as a solar influence
in the home. Her special office is still that of using
insight, and supreme interest in the actual personal-
ities encircling her, to totalize the lives subject to

38

MARRIAGE

her sway, to resolve the discords, nay, to utilize
them as great composers do, in order by the deft
management of contrasts to create a nobler music.
I do not ignore the essential participation of the
father. Both parents jointly are responsible and
effectual, but in respect to that unity of life of which
I have been speaking the part of tfre woman seems
to me predominant.

/

There is one other point touching the relation of
husband and wife that I should like to add. Mar-
riage, when rightly undertaken, with a right view
of its purpose, becomes a school of moral optimism.
The shadows fall on the way of life; the fogs rise;
the clouds thicken. Adversity suddenly approaches,
and offers herself as a companion on the road. Be-
reavement, perchance, takes away the flower of the'
flock; or, worse still, there is a so-called black sheep
in the family, and the hopes that were staked on a
young life are miserably defeated. Then by all the
deep affection we bear to one another are we im-
pelled to console and uplift, to seek to see the silver
lining of the cloud, that we may show it to our com-
rade. And as only the truth will answer, we are
constrained to rise to such spiritual heights as to
dispel the mists that impede our own vision, in order
that we may actually see the silver lining, the light
beyond the darkness and to the spiritual eye there
is always a light beyond the darkness. And thus
marriage becomes a means of most exalted spiritual
enlargement, an incentive to sane and sound opti-

39

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

mism, to the end that we may enthuse the strain of
optimism into the depression at our side which we
cannot bear to witness, and lift the cloud that has
settled on one beloved head.

IV

THE REVOLT AGAINST
CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

THE world is certainly at present in a strange-
way. The younger people especially are
troubled and perplexed, and seem to the on-
looker to be drifting rather wildly in respect to
moral opinions and conduct. But it is not a question
of young people only. Some of the most extreme
revolters in morals to-day are older persons. In
Drinkwater's play "Mary Stuart" it is the older man
from whose lips drips the gospel of immoralism.
The young man, the husband, is devoted to his wife,
refusing to share her affections with a friend whom
he has introduced into the house, and the older man
lectures him on the greatness of so-called inclusive
love. It is he who brings up Mary Stuart as an
example of the great lover. The point is that at the
present time two streams are converging: the natu-
ral radicalism of the young, whose privilege it is to
desire novelty (the world would not get on very well
if there were not this desire among the young; it is
a needed protest against what is unsound, decayed,
decrepit in the traditions and there is always a
great deal of that in what is handed down from the
past) and besides there is also the general unsettle*

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

ment of ideas among older people. The two factors
combine the radicalism of the young, and the un-
settlement of ideas in the community at large.

Now "the revolt against conventional morality"
is the phrase of the revolters themselves, for it is
the thing which they call conventional morality that
they repudiate. And a first question I would ask
them is whether they mean to do away with the
things that are conventional in the traditional moral-
ity, the things that are just conventional, and nothing
more whether it is these that they want to get rid
of, or whether they have come to think that morality
itself is nothing more than a convention, that moral-
ity as such must be discarded.

It will be well, for clearness' sake, to define the
word we are using, the word convention. What is
a convention? It is an agreement without intrinsic
justification, deriving its force wholly from the fact
that people have somehow agreed to observe it.
They might as well have agreed to observe some-
thing else. For instance, a certain legal phrase-
ology used in drawing up contracts is a convention.
It has been agreed to use this terminology in order
more carefully to distinguish between a binding con-
tract and a verbal understanding. But a wholly
different phraseology might equally serve. Also the
seal affixed to a contract is a matter of convention.
But a contract itself is not a convention, far from
it. A contract between two merchants is a pledge
by one to do a certain thing on condition that the
other in his turn will do a certain thing. The

42

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

essence of the contract is faith-keeping, promise-
keeping. That is not a convention. That your word
should be as good as your bond is a moral principle.
Here plainly you have a difference between morality
proper and convention.

I go further and say that even mere conventions
often have a moral interest connected with them, >re
indirectly subservient to moral ends. The criterion
which I offer to distinguish between a conventional
act and a moral act, is that the former is not intrin-
sically binding, and could be replaced by some other
mode of behavior more or less arbitrary, while a
moral act is justified in its own right. At the same
time, I add, even mere conventions are not always
to be belittled, even conventional acts may be worth
while because, though in themselves meaningless,
they serve or symbolize a moral idea. An example
is salutation by lifting the hat, by bowing the head.
The idea. is to show respect. One might show re-
spect in different ways. In some countries they place
the hand on the heart, a more poetic manner of
salutation, but the idea is the same. Shaking the
hands on meeting a friend or acquaintance is another
example. The proverbial visitor from another
planet, who had never seen such a performance as
handshaking might consider it extremely ridiculous.
One person stretches forth an arm, and with the
extremities of it grasps the extremities of another
person's arm, and the two being joined produce a
certain vibration. How absurd 1 What connection
is there between the thing done and the idea in-

43

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

tended? Why should shaking another person by
the neck be a sign of hostility, and shaking his hand
a sign of friendliness? No matter why. It is a
convention, and it is not worth while to quarrel with
it, though in the case of public officers like the
President of the United States it may at times be-
come an extremely inconvenient convention.

Young people, adolescents, are often needlessly
troubled as to the truthfulness of observing these
general social understandings. "Is it honest," they
say, "to use the expression 'How do you do?' "
intimating thereby a desire to be informed as to the
welfare of a person to whom one is really quite in-
different; or to say "I am pleased to make your
acquaintance" when the feeling of pleasure may be
quite absent? Such phrases, however, are current
coin in social intercourse ; they have rubbed off their
literal meaning, but still have a certain utility as a
means of showing respect, or as indicative of the
way one ought to feel towards other people even if
one does not.

The curious circumstance is that the young, who
are so insistent against convention, are themselves
the most conventional people in the world. There
is nothing so conventional as a company of young
persons. Even their unconventionality is a conven-
tion. Young girls smoke cigarettes or imitate the
dress of men on the plea of convenience, perhaps,
though that is often a mere pretext, the reason being
that it is the most recent fashion or convention to

44

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

efface as far as possible the distinction between the
two sexes. Sometimes these unconventional pro-
ceedings go to great lengths, as when the vices of
men are imitated, young girls joining in vulgar
carousals or taking part in dances which serve to
stimulate sensual excitement *

Again, a mere convention may be a useful safe-
guard which should be observed by those who do not
need it for the sake of those who do. The chaperon
at entertainments, for instance, is objected to be-
cause her presence seems to imply that the young
people cannot take care of themselves. But one
must remember that when we speak of the young
we are speaking of different ages and different
grades. And certainly it is a fact that some of
those whom we call the young people cannot take
care of themselves without assistance. Have you
had the opportunity that some of our lawyers have
to know the secret history of very good families
and of their daughters? The fact, I repeat, is that
some of these young people do not take care of
themselves. They are not strong enough to be
placed in situations where the hot blood of youth
is unduly tempted, while others no doubt are strong.
And those who are, it seems to me, should be willing
to countenance certain restrictions which, though not
required for themselves, are indispensable for the
weak. The old-fashioned chaperon is not in my
mind. What I am thinking of is self-government.
Self-government is the best plan. When young peo-
ple get together they should adopt their own rules

45

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

and see to it that they are followed, but it is still
prudent that an older person should often be present
to lend support to those rules.

At the same time there are conventions that ought
to be abolished. In what is called "society" it has
been the convention to keep the young woman, the
so-called "sheltered" woman, in a kind of hot-house
atmosphere. She must not do any useful work. She
is expected to live the idiotic life of pleasure, to give
chief attention to her apparel, to the ritual of social
calling, and the like. All this empty, hollow life is
being discountenanced, and rightly. The war espe-
cially had a very beneficent effect in summoning
women, younger and older, to active service, and it
is likely that its influence in this respect will be last-
ing. Here, then, we have an example of a conven-
tional notion that society is well rid of, to the profit
of all concerned.

But now I come to the main point. Is it true that
essential morality itself, that the moral principles are
conventions, that they have no justification in them-
selves, that the world only observes them, in so far
as it does observe them, because there has been an
agreement to that effect?

When Macbeth after the murder cries out, "Sleep
no more. Macbeth does murder sleep," is that cry
an expression of the annoyance he felt because he
had broken a convention? Or when Cain, the first
murderer, shuddered at his ghastly deed, did the
sense of guilt which sent him forth a fugitive over

46

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

the earth arise out of the consideration that respect
for human life is a useful convention? And if some
moral principles, some moral laws such as that
against murder, are grounded in intrinsic right and
reason, had we not better pause and ask whether
there may not also be other principles and laws
which have the same warrant, instead of dismissing
morality in toto, as an arbitrary affair, as some per-
sons nowadays are inclined to do? It is true that
there are different types of morality, and this has
misled not a few modern writers into thinking that
morality has no solid ground to stand on since what
is right at one time and among one people may often
be considered wrong at a different stage of develop-
ment and among a different people. There is one
kind of morality, it has been said, for the temperate
zone, and another for the tropics, and men can
change their morality as they do their garments.
But this is a superficial observation which ignores
the striking fact that among all peoples and at all
times there has been a sense that some things are
right and that other things are wrong. In other
words there has been a sense of Tightness, however
dark may have been the interpretations of unen-
lightened peoples as to what is right and wrong.
And in the second place the sounder moral judg-
ments of the present day in the more advanced com-
munities are not to be upset by summoning as wit-
nesses against them the backward moral opinions
and practices of former ages, or of the quasi-
primitive tribes such as still exist in different parts of

47

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

the globe. There has been advance in ethical science
just as there has been in physical science. And just
as the astronomy of Newton is not rendered invalid
or insecure by comparing it with the astronomy of
the Chaldeans, or the medical practice of Pasteur
by comparing it with the practice of the Indian medi-
cine man, so the best moral insight of the present
time is not invalidated, is not shaken in its authority,
by all the mass of evidence which the anthropologists
and ethnologists have dug up as illustrative of the
variety of moral opinions and moral practice among
the members of the human race.

The certainty of a scientific law does not depend
on the unanimous consent of all mankind. A scien-
tific law may actually be understood, as to the
grounds upon which the demonstration of it rests,
by a mere handful of scientists. Its certainty never-
theless is unimpeached when those who are compe-
tent to understand it approve it, when the results
that have been won by experiment are ratified by
those who are capable of repeating the experiment.
And in like manner morality, or the art and science
of harmonizing human relations, depends for the
validity of its generalizations, and of the principal
rules that flow from them, upon the approbation of
those persons who understand the terms of the vari-
ous moral problems, and who experimentally in their
own experience test the solutions.

A precious fund of experience has indeed been
accumulated in the past in regard to these subjects,
a fund which must not be lightly cast aside. One

48

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

at least of the difficulties in the way of real moral
advance to-day is the tendency and it is naturally
noticeable among the young to belittle the past, to
treat society as if it were wax to be molded at will
by every zealous reformer. This tendency I do not
share. I believe that our affiliation with the past may
not be disrupted. I believe that the good content in
the tradition which our predecessors have handed
down to us must be preserved, but at the same time
I am thoroughly convinced that the good which we
have inherited from the past can only be preserved
if it be recast, reinterpreted, presented in forms
suited to present needs in brief, if the good is
thus transmuted into the better.

Now I should like to make an application of this
thought to certain outstanding subjects which are in
debate between the younger and the older genera-
tion. The first of these is the subject of authority,
more particularly of parental authority. Should the
idea of authority be preserved? I say, yes. Should
it be reinterpreted? I say likewise, yes. The young
rebels are perfectly right when they object to a cer-
tain kind of authority. They are perfectly wrong
when they dismiss the notion of authority altogether.
They are then spilling the wine with the lees. One
party, the standpatters, insist on the lees; the other
party, the rebels, insist on the wine, but they spill
the wine with the lees. Now, as to the family, what
are the facts to-day? There is a change in the func-
tion of the family, and with it must come a change

49

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

in the kind of authority which the heads of the fam-
ily may properly exercise. In the past, when society
was stationary, the family was the organ by which
the existing order was recruited the fixed, unalter-
able places in it as they became vacant were filled.
In the great families the object was to keep the
estate intact, to hand it down from one generation
to the next without change. In the guilds among the
artisans the son stepped into the shoes of the father,
was expected to follow exactly the same vocation as
the father. Everything was so ordered as to keep
things as they were, to keep the framework of
society and its subdivisions immutable. Into one of
these subdivisions the son must be fitted. If he
showed a fondness for novelty, a will of his own, it
was the duty of the parent to curb, to restrain, to
reduce him to conformity. The aim of the family
was to take the younger generation and fit them into
the same mold that had been occupied by their
seniors. To-day society is essentially progressive,
and the change in the family corresponds to the
change in society. The business of the family is to
prepare its offspring to take part in the progress of
society. The authority of the parent should be
exercised in such a way as to prepare the youth for
that vocation for which nature has fitted him and for
sane and wise innovation. Authority should only be
exercised with a view to its eventual extinction, with
a view to putting the young into the way of inde-
pendence, freedom. But a certain measure of au-
thority in the early periods of life is indispensable

50

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

to this very end, and when wisely exercised will meet
with no unwilling response.

The next subject in debate between the younger
and the older generation arises from the desire of
the younger generation to eat of the fruit of the
tree. There is at present a realistic movement in
manners and morals even as there is in art. Its aim
is to embrace the whole of life. The younger gen-
eration to-day are intensely realistic. They are keen
to know the whole of life, and especially that part
which has been curtained off the seamy side, the
under side ; they want to be as gods, knowing good
and evil especially evil. Not, let me hasten to
add, because of any depraved inclinations on their
part, but because of the realistic feeling that they
must include in their knowledge the evil side of
things. The theory that prevailed in the past was
the reality theory as opposed to the realistic theory.
It was held that there is a capital distinction be-
tween the abnormal and the normal, the accidental
and the essential, the transient and the lasting, fea-
tures of life, and that reality is reached by elimi-
nating the abnormal, the accidental, the transient,
and selecting for comprehension the typical, the
essential, the permanent.

I believe strongly that the principle of elimination,
or of reality, should be preserved, as against the
tendency to promiscuous realism. I regard this
principle as one of the invaluable good elements in
the tradition which we have inherited. At the same

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

time I am perfectly aware that huge mistakes have
been made in the process of elimination, that often
the unessential has been selected, and the truly es-
sential eliminated; and that if there is to be a new
classicism in life as in art, the time is ripe for a
thorough overhauling of the types of character and
behavior set up as models, retaining, indeed as indis-
pensable the principle that a selection must be made
from the bewildering tangle of experiences which
make up what we call life, but insisting no less upon
a new insight as to what are the items to be selected.

Sex education, as proposed by its wisest advocates
is an example of the better turn that things are now
taking, though I wish it might be less negative, and
that a positive ideal of noble relations in marriage
might be made prominent.

And, if it be asked whether there is any general
criterion that can be proposed as a guide in the
process of selection, I should say that in my own
case I have found most helpful the rule of leaving
aside whatever does not feed my intelligence, what-
ever nutriment I cannot convert into energy. I find
this a very helpful rule. The field of knowledge is
so vast that one is simply lost if he tries to know all
the things which it would be interesting to know.
There is a vast difference between being interested
in knowing and deriving power and energy from
knowledge. There are many knowledges that
merely minister to one's curiosity. Ajid, if in addi-
tion one were to attempt to master the different
arts, and to acquaint himself with the infinitely com*

52

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

plex facts of social behavior, he is sure to end by
knowing so many things, or having a smattering of
so many things, as in truth to know nothing, and
also to be good for nothing. It is evident that no
matter how realistic people may be in theory, in
practice every one is forced to adopt the principle of
selection, and I believe, as I have said, that a certain
stern resolve to renounce whatever knowledge can-
not be transmuted into energy is the best aid in
selection.

Now this applies obviously, among other things,
to the question whether one should eat of the fruit
of the tree, whether it is desirable to know the
seamy side, the under side, the crime side of life, to
know the perversities, the abnormalities, etc. One
cannot help knowing something of these things,
enough and more than enough, in the ordinary
routine of one's existence, but deliberately to seek
them out is a grievous error, for the reason that the
knowledge of these things is depressing, and instead
of increasing energy has the opposite effect. I re-
member experiencing this kind of depression at the
time when, as a member of the State Tenement
House Commission, it was part of my duty to visit
some of the lowest haunts of misery in the city of
New York. The sights and scenes exhibited to my
eyes have never ceased to haunt me since, have left a
stain upon the mind as if the mere knowledge of
such degradation of the god-like form of man were
itself a degradation. One cannot help coming in
contact with evil, and I believe one cannot ever be

S3

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

entirely immune to the contagious effects of it, if it
be only in the way just indicated. But it is rela-
tively safe to risk the encounter of moral as well as
physical evil if one does so in the course of the
endeavor to overcome, or at least to mitigate it.
The physician, the social worker, are at least rela-
tively immune.

Once more then I say to young people: Try to
know life by all means, but do not mistake death for
life. The course some of you are embarking on
brings you into contact with corruption, with death,
not with life.

THE ETHICAL ATTITUDE
TOWARDS ENEMIES

TO live truly a man must date his life before the
day of his birth as an individual. k He must
identify himself with mankind, think of himself as a
disciple of Prometheus, and feel the fusion of his
life with that great being, Humanity, which lives on
through the ages. Consciously he must carry the
past into his present. He should study history, not
with any vain, impossible hope of knowing all the
facts, but to achieve vital contact with those great
moments in which humanity put forth a vital effort.
Such contact is a spiritual impregnation. It com-
municates the contagion of effort.

Having thus risen, in thought and feeling, to the
idea of humanity, he should choose a vocation that
will enable him best to serve humanity. Not wealth,
not fame, but the need of mankind, should be the
supreme consideration in fixing his choice. What,
from that point of view, is his place and function in
the world?

And in all things, he should look to the end.
Though the various lines of progress in science, in
art, in technology, and the rest seem to be parallel,
they nevertheless should conveige^qyards a final

55

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

end in the spiritual life. Of that end the simplest
expression is that a state of things shall exist on
earth wherein the law of the jungle, of life subsist-
ing on life, shall be replaced by that of life enhancing
other life. Progress is thus to be conceived of as
spiritual.

This, the master-thought that is to apply in all
relations, gives us the key to the solution of the
problem of how to act towards enemies. We must
so treat them as to change them into factors of the
spiritual progress of mankind, and in so doing effect
a certain change in ourselves. It is no longer merely
a question of our own individual attitude towards
them. Something greater, the greatest thing of all,
is involved, and that is the spiritual uplifting of
humanity. We must make an entirely new departure
in approaching the problem. From the point of
view we have now reached we see the figure of Hu-
manity awaiting its progress, that Promethean figure
standing as a witness of the enmity between myself
and my foe, and the fateful bidding of that figure as
determining what should be our mutual attitude.

The enemy is an injurer, and against' him who
does me harm the raw instinct is for unstinted venge-
ance; to repay him not merely an equivalent, but
multifold. It is not generally realized that the lex
talionis, the law of retaliation, prescribing an eye
(only) for an eye, a tooth (only) for a tooth, was a
restraint on unbridled revenge. Experience begot
prudence. Men came to see that of the vendetta
there is no end, and that the blood feud is suicidal.

56

TOWARDS ENEMIES

Then a loftier moral feeling reenforced the counsels
of prudence, and stigmatized the ferocity of crude
impulse. Thus in the Old Testament we find the
injunction, "If thine enemy's ox be astray, do not
rejoice, he being your enemy, that his beast is lost,
but restore his property to him." Abstain from
what the Germans call Schadenfreude a wprd for
which there is no exact English equivalent meaning
gladness at the loss of another. Elsewhere in the
Old Testament there is proclaimed the law of re-
quiting good for evil. You will thereby, as the
Book of Proverbs says, heap coals of fire upon the
head of him who has done you wrong; that is, make
him burn with shame that he has injured one who
proves to be his friend. Penetrating still more
deeply is the warning in the Gospels, " Judge not,
that ye be not judged." Who are you to set up
yourself as a critic? Are you guiltless? Are your
hands so clean that you may presume to pronounce
sentence, and by applying a strict standard to others
challenge its application to yourself? The warning
does not necessarily enjoin charity to the faults of
others. It sharply awakens your sleeping conscience
and makes you aware of your own.

Nobler and more admirable are those counsels of
the great teachers who have inculcated actual love
of enemies, of human injurers. Socrates says it is
better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Buddha
went beyond that. In a book called "The Path of
Virtue," he said, "Hatred is not healed by hatred at
any time; hatred is healed by love," and adds, "This

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

is an old rule." The Sermon on the Mount more
tenderly, and in extreme language, enforces the les-
son which Buddha had taught more than five cen-
turies earlier, and I propose to examine the Christian
teaching of the forgiveness and love of enemies.
What in it is sound, and what untenable?

On the face of it, the precept that a man shall
love his enemies, goes against human nature. The
man in the street is apt to brush it aside as an ex-
travaganza, as a fantastic, visionary, and rather
anemic teaching, or as Lord Birkenhead put it
recently, as a precept never meant to be practiced,
but intended only to create a sort of soft, sentimental
atmosphere in a hard world, wherein, however,
"stout arms and sharp swords" are still to be the
instruments of men's wills. How, indeed, can you
love what is hostile to you and unlovely? For exam-
ple, how can you love a thief who takes your prop-
erty; or a person who spreads malicious gossip about
you ; or a man who pays you starvation wages, while
you perhaps are working the nails off your fingers
to support an old parent, and then reduces your
wages below even that pittance? If by loving your
enemy be meant embracing him a'nd showing him
affection, that is impossible. But so to conceive it
would be to misunderstand love. It is indeed con-
trary to human nature to love what is unlovely; but
what is meant by the commandment to love your
enemy is just this: that in that hostile person, who
revolts you, there is something which is not unlovely.

58

TOWARDS ENEMIES

In him, too, there is to be presumed a divine spark
capable of being fanned into a purer flame; the in-
vincible, the inextinguishable possible of the better,
of the best. And if you believe in the real presence
of that deeper nature, you can reach over the outer
hideousness and see the thing that is hidden there,
the latent fire of good. A man is what he sees. If
you have the strength to pass beyond the forbidding,
the repulsive, outer wall, if you have the gift to look
within, you will thereby be changed and elevated in
your own nature. In overcoming the anger and
disgust of your first recoil something nobler has
come to life in you.

This is the foundation on which is based the doc-
trine of loving your enemies, as it is termed. The
word loving, I have said, has misleading associa-
tions ; it suggests putting one's arm around an enemy
and being affectionate, whereas your love is for
something lovely that is obscured by an outer repul-
siveness, something that demands of you a self-
overcoming if it is to be seen, and therewith a self-
exaltation. It is a vision that follows a victory.

And when a man is actually hurting you and seems
a very incarnation of evil, that victory is difficult.
If you are merely a spectator it is less so. But in
the degree that you yourself suffer, the spiritual
effort to see what is human glimmering far back in
the soul of the being that is hurting you becomes
more intense, and the effort is the more transfigur-
ing, your victory the nobler.

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

When the tie of blood binds you to your injurer
forgiveness may not demand so heroic an effort of
self-overcoming. In one sense, indeed, you may feel
more keenly the hurt inflicted on you by a brother or
other relative than that which you suffer from a
stranger. Perhaps a brother raised under the same
roof with you did not visit you in sickness : he was
too busy to come. Or there was a financial emer-
gency in your affairs, and in your straits he left you
to go to strangers for aid. And now the wheel
turns. His own health has broken down; his for-
tune is in danger of ruin. Will you remember that
he was your injurer, and desert him, or will you
remember that he is your brother?

A son sent by you to college is wasting his time
and his allowance in dissipation. Repeated warn-
ings have not availed. He is now in debt and will
be reduced to extremities unless you help him out,
and the mother pleads once more forgive, will you
forgive ?

What is forgiveness? To forgive is not to forget.
It is not to mention, but does not therefore involve
forgetfulness, or cancellation of the past. When
you forgive a fault you do not cast it in the teeth of
the person you have pardoned: but on neither side
is there forgetting, and there should not be. To
forgive is to throw a rope to one struggling in the
water, and to enable him to come safe to shore. To
forgive does not necessarily follow repentance. To
forgive is so to act as to induce repentance; it is to
show faith in the better side of the one who has done

60

TOWARDS ENEMIES

the wrong, and by that evocative act of belief in
his truer self, lead him to repent and to enter on the
new way of living you have revealed to him. Then
comes reconciliation, and reconciliation between the
pardoned and the pardoner js a sacramental tie. It
means that the one has fallen, and that the other has
gone down into the depths of the valley of guilt and
raised him and risen with him.

These preliminary considerations bring us to the
doctrine of Jesus as to the forgiveness of enemies.
In that teaching there are two points wherein I con-
cur, and three at which I must diverge; and I wish
to set forth without undue elaboration the points of
agreement and of difference. First then, as to the
respects wherein I am in accord.

Jesus teaches that if any one is in the grip of an
enemy, suffering oppression without help and with-
out hope, there are two things he can do. Being
physically helpless, he can nevertheless rise to his
feet ethically, spiritually, and save his self-respect,
by realizing that in himself also there is something
of that same evil strain which in the oppressor is
injuring him. He can then lift himself above his
foe by using his experience of wrong to purify his
own nature, to expel from it that evil strain which
he finds in himself, not in the same measure, per-
haps, not so overtly, but yet existing. For the
oppressed is ever apt to be the potential oppressor.
The persecuted has it in him to be a persecutor, and
the way by which he can attain to integrity, and

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

make even enmity serve the uses of the spiritual life,
is to realize more profoundly how it hurts to be
persecuted, and to cast out of himself the persecuting
devil. Here I am in complete agreement with the
Christian teaching.

The other point is that he should show his love
for his enemy by his example, and lead the oppressor,
too, to purify himself of the spirit of oppression.
He will thus be the benefactor of his foe. He will
thus fulfill the commandment, Do good to them that
persecute you and revile you, and say all manner
of evil against you; and bless them that curse you.

Human nature, raw, uneducated human nature
takes another point of view. When we are hurt, we
see only that; we are blind to the fact that we are
potentially of the same kind as the wrongdoer. Yet
it is true, and the truth is written large in history.
When the Swiss wrested their independence from
the Austrians, they promptly sought to impose the
yoke on their neighbors. We read of nothing more
inspiring than the heroic contest of the Dutch with
Spain, their noble resistance to tyranny; but no
sooner had they achieved their national independence
than these same Hollanders began to exercise op-
pression in their own country. Among the Jews in
Poland, before emancipation came, not a few of the
rich Jews oppressed the poor Jews. This has ever
been the case; there is in the persecuted something
that is potentially persecuting. Jesus said, Behold,
here is your chance. You feel in your flesh how it

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hurts; realize, then, how it hurts any other whom
you are disposed to hurt.

Turning to those aspects of the Christian teaching
with which I cannot find myself in agreement, let us
take first the saying, "If any one smite thee on the
right cheek, present to him the other also ; if any one
take away thy coat, give him thy cloak also." Every
unbiased reader feels the fine intent there, and yet
must feel at once a movement of dissent. A critic
like Nietzsche is of course incredibly on the wrong
track when he speaks of the servility enjoined by this
precept. Very evidently that is not the spirit of the
injunction. On the other hand a crude literalism
travesties it. I do not know whether a certain jew-
eler whose shop was attacked the other day was a
Christian or not; but assume that he was and wished
to live up literally to the precepts of the Master.
The gunman took away twenty thousand dollars'
worth; was it the jeweler's part to present the other
cheek also, and offer an additional twenty thousand
dollars' worth which the thief had overlooked? A
reckless automobile driver has driven his machine
over you, and crushed one of your limbs. Are you,
as you lie there, to beckon the nearest bystander and
suggest that the driver shall run his machine over
the other limb also? The symbolism of the meaning
is obvious in the crescendo statements of the pre-
cept. If any one takes your coat, give him your
mantle also. If any man forces you to go a mile,
go with him twain. If any one gives you a blow on
the right cheek a left-handed blow turn the other

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

'and let him strike you with the full force of the
right hand also.

The symbolism enshrines the world view of many
finer spirits of the age of Jesus : it expresses an other-
worldliness which despairs of this world. The Ser-
mon on the Mount was spoken to a people bowed
beneath irremediable injustice. On them rested the
crushing weight of the Roman rule. They could
not hope by their own efforts to lift that weight, and
the soul-sickness bred by the constant sight of cor-
ruption and violence made them weary of the world.
The Roman power was then omnipotent. The clash
of armies and the invasion of provinces seemed to
have banished justice from the earth. Jesus and
many others of the nobler spirits of the time turned
with repulsion from it all, convinced that a super-
human change could not long be flayed. As in the
days of Noah, God would repent of his creation, and
destroy the earth, this time not with water, but with
fire. All that was evil would perish in a mighty
conflagration, something like that staged in the
Gotterdammerung. But Jesus was ethically opti-
mistic. After the old evil order had vanished in
flame, there would be a renewal. A better world
would follow miraculously; the Kingdom of Heaven
would be established on earth for those who had
rooted out of their nature all those evil desires and
impulses which bind people to this baser world : the
craving for wealth, the lust of sex, the impulse to-
wards self-assertion. These were the fetters to be
broken if one would enter the Kingdom of Heaven

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TOWARDS ENEMIES

on earth. Put off the natural man if you would put
on the spiritual; and thereby gain admission to a
supernatural world order here and now.

As to the sex relation, fornication is absolutely
condemned, but even marriage is less commendable
than celibacy. Why perpetuate this defiling thing,
this rotten world; why not condemn in your own
nature the source of all manner of corruption ?

Behold, then, he said, you live here helpless in an
evil world. How can I help you ; can I urge and aid
you to shake off the yoke of Rome? It is impossible.
One course only is open to you, and that is to believe
in the coming change, and to fit yourselves for living
in that sweeter world by dying to this, by achieving
indifference to all those things which are desired
by people who cling to this life, creature comforts,
self-assertion, and the effectuation of their own will.
The meaning of the precept should now be clear. If
you are in the grip of an enemy, your foe is one of
the factors of, this evil world. How can you es-
cape? You cannot break the yoke, but you can use
the opportunity to fit yourself and him for that
better world. If he demands your coat, give him
your mantle also. Be indifferent to the most ele-
mentary creature comforts. Show him that you
have freed yourself from this pitiful craving for
creature comforts, this quest for the material. Give
him your cloak if he asks for your coat. If he
strikes you, turn the other cheek; if he asks you to
go with him a mile, go two; if he says, I will have
my way, you shall not have yours, let him have his

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

way. For this desire of self-assertion to the sup-
pression of others' wills is one of the most venomous
seeds of corruption. Cleanse yourself of it, and in
your indifference to this garment of flesh which is
presently to pass away, show him that even a blow
is no more to you than a puff of wind. You may
no longer build your self-respect on what men think
of you or do to you. You must establish it on that
supernatural character which you are acquiring, and
you must aid him to acquire that character also.

It is evident that there is a fundamental difference
between the point of view of a religion of spiritual
progress and the Christian standpoint. The religion
of spiritual progress is not other-worldly. However
dark may be the state of the world we are not al-
lowed to abandon hope, to lose courage, to relinquish
effort. We do not condemn the desire for wealth
as an evil in itself; we condemn greed. We do not
say that the love of man and woman is evil ; we say
that abominable incontinence is evil. We do not say
that self-affirmation is evil ; we say that self-affirma-
tion at the expense of other wills is evil. We do not
think of spirituality as the self-emptying of every
natural impulse or desire ; on the contrary, we affirm
that spirituality consists in taking these as they come
from the hands of nature, sublimating them, and so
making them subserve the highest ends.

A second point of difference is that the Christian
teaching takes account only of individual enmities,
and not of group enmities. It is a defect of the

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Christian ethic that it dealt only with the relation
of person to person, not of group to group ; and for
this reason, while for many the Christian ideas have
been an inspiration in the personal relations, they
have left the public relations unpenetrated. We
have thus the strange situation of an ethical doc-
trine that has contact ethically with just one impor-
tant spot in life but stands apart, at an angle, away
from the other parts of life.

Now it is these group enmities that we must
deal with. Their magnitude and menace raise issues
of life and death. Consider the case of the Jews of
Eastern Europe, harried and ravaged by pogroms.
There are more than eight million of Jews outside
Palestine, and they cannot all go thither. Here it
is not a question of the relation of individual to
individual; it is the oppression of a group by an
enemy group, inflamed by racial antipathy and re-
ligious prejudices imbibed in infancy. Or take the
case of the blatant, truculent nationalisms that are
springing up all over the world. In both instances
also the religion of spiritual progress uses the
method that Jesus prescribed, the method of self-
searching and self-purification. In your nature as
a group you have stuff in you such as is in your
haters. You too have the spirit of racial antipathy
and of blatant nationalism, though to recognize this
is not to palliate or excuse Anti-Semitism, for ex-
ample. Make use therefore of your hurt to ask
whether you, too, are not prone to extravagant
nationalism and to the odium theologicum, and strive

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

to purify yourself spiritually as a member-of your
group.

The colored people of the South are subject to
the most unfair discriminations on account of their
color; but it is said that there are similar discrimina-
tions in certain negro communities between the light-
er-colored and the darker-colored members of the
race.

Wage-earners complain of the unscrupulous em-
ployer, and the employer complains of the unscru-
pulous trade unions. Nobody would say that all
employers are tyrannical. But that there are unscru-
pulous employers, none will deny, and having in mind
that type, let us turn to the labor organizations, and
the history of the relations of the craft unions be-
tween one another and to the masses of the unskilled
workers. Is this history not replete with instances
of similar unfairness and oppression as that to which
the laborers as a body are exposed at the hands of
hostile capitalists? The member of a group, there-
fore, besides considering his relations to other indi-
viduals, should make clear to himself what the
tendencies of his group are, and if the group be op-
pressed, use that experience to clean house morally.
It is not, of course, to every man that the spiritual
rule appeals. But if a man who is treated like dirt
beneath the feet of those in whose power he is
helpless would reestablish his self-respect and be-
come morally elevated in his own eyes, he can only
effect that by eliminating from himself the same evil
that works in those who mistreat him.

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Finally there is the most important point of di-
vergence, and that is the conception of what is spir-
itual. For Jesus, as I have said, the spiritual nature
of man is that which is purged of all earthward
desire, cleansed of the impulses that attach men to
this present world. In our view the spiritual is that
which uses the natural impulses, seeing in them an
opportunity of creating in human society the oppo-
site of the law of the jungle. These very cravings
and tendencies that point us to earth offer occasion to
become functionally spiritual. Functional and spir-
itual, in the full sense of the words functional and
spiritual, are to my mind interchangeable terms.

The functional ideal may be illustrated in in-
dustry, where the division and diversification of
functions, as of managers, executives, organizers, sci-
entific and technical experts, and the workers of vari-
ous grades is so striking. Each of these persons
has a distinctive; function to perform. He does it
spiritually if he so exercises his office, so fulfills the
particular task allotted to him, as not to destroy or
suppress the functional performance of others, but
to facilitate and enhance it. And if in any field
you are my enemy, my duty is to enlist you as a
factor in the spiritual progress of mankind by press-
ing you to perform your function. My role is to side
with what is functionally best in you, help to make
it manifest, make it appear out of its hiding. And
to that end I must try to form in my mind an image
of how your function may be rightly performed, and

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hold up that image before you. I must try to make
you see the thing you ought to do and be, in industry
or anywhere else. To bring into industry this
larger spirit of team-work is to raise the stature of
others and your own. The highest achievement of
the head is to develop in those nearest to him, and
through them in every member of the vocation, the
will and the ability to do their part of the work
better because of the particular way in which he is
accomplishing his own task. But if the head is an
enemy, an exploiter of his employees, then their duty
to him, and their triumph over him, is boldly to pro-
claim his true function, to impel him to it, to win him
for it, to induce him to put the dollar second and
his function first.

Another example. The whites in the South are
in advance of the negroes. It is their function to
assist the more backward people not only in gaining
an economic footing, but in catching up with civili-
zation in the ordering of their family life and in the
extirpation of crime. But at present many of the
white people are acting in the very opposite way.
They retard the formation of a family life among
the ex-slaves by the licentiousness they permit them-
selves in their relations to negro women, by the
degradation of the refined negro woman when she
is required to associate with coarse men in the Jim
Crow cars. While by treating the negro, the mo-
ment he is accused, and without proof, as if he were
guilty, they prevent discrimination between guilty
and innocent among the negroes themselves. In so

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far as this is true, the whites are not discharging the
functions of an advanced population towards a pop-
ulation backward through no fault of their own.
What, in these circumstances, is the functional spir-
itual relation for the colored man? It is to see
what the white man ought to be and to do, and to
hold up to him, as in a mirror, the role he ought to
play as a moral helper.

We are always losing sight of the tremendous
fact that we tend to make of other people what we
see in them. Not indeed absolutely and in every in-
dividual case, but in the long run, we make people
behave as they ought to behave if we see how they
ought to behave. To-day the great difficulty in
dealing with oppressors is that the oppressed and
their advocates are always protesting. Indignant
spokesmen, the world over, are loudly declaring how
men ought not to act. Injustice will decline by the
vision of how things should be done, not by pro-
claiming how things should not be done. But few
and rare are the noble ideals that shine out in the
world as to how men ought to act rightly. In some
instances we can speak with a certain confidence.
In the greater number it is very difficult, requiring
the labor of many minds that combine experience,
knowledge of the facts, and ethical purpose to form
a mental picture of the right spiritual relations be-
tween groups now hostile.

While we spend ourselves in protests against what
should not be, we neglect to affirm the vital, eternal,

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

convincing mind-pictures of the way in which nations
and lesser groups should act towards one another.
The clamor of mere indignation is barren. The
vision of what men should be and do holds rich
promise for the future. The spirit of the religion
of spiritual progress offers the redeeming message
that we can make of our enemies functionaries in
the world, and factors of spiritual development.
The greatest boon we can confer upon a man is to
impel him to what he can best do, and what it is
most honorable for him to do ; and hence the rule I
commend to the oppressed and injured in the world
is that they take sides with their enemy. That gos-
pel will give a new turn to the labor struggle, to
the strife of the many against the few, of the
physically weak against the physically or intellec-
tually strong. The oppressor, I have said, is also
the suppressor. He suppresses in himself some-
thing infinitely worth while. Take sides, therefore,
with your enemy and not against him; take sides
with the oppressor, not in so far as he is an oppres-
sor, but in so far as he is a suppressor, take sides
with that in him which he suppresses. Make him
see how he wrongs himself when he wrongs you.
In siding with what is best in him against what is
worst, you will experience in yourself also a pro-
foundly transforming change.

Flattery as commonly understood is a detestable
thing. It plays on the foibles of others for its own
ends. But there is a righteous kind of flattery
which makes people think better of themselves than

7*

TOWARDS ENEMIES

they ever dared to think, and makes them aware of
possibilities they have suppressed or have never ex-
plored. Flattery of that kind we should use both
to our friends and to our enemies. In friends too
we should see some excellence unseen by them, or
neglected, or suppressed, bring it to their knowledge
and make it more real to them by our perceiving
it. We must be flatterers, righteous flatterers both
of our friends and enemies, and we shall find that
that kind of flattery is in the long run irresistible.

VI

THE STRAIN BETWEEN THE OLDER
GENERATION AND THE YOUNGER

OjTRAINED relations between older and younger
O persons, between fathers and sons, mothers and
daughters, are often due to pronounced tempera-
mental differences, since Nature in her sardonic
mood sometimes binds together in the tie of con-
sanguinity the most uncongenial dispositions. David,
as narrated in the Bible, suffered more from the
son whom he loved than from any of his enemies.
And the first parents even had the terrible grief of
bringing up their eldest son to be the murderer of
the younger. Maladjustments in families, then, be-
tween the senior and junior members, have been and
are of quite frequent occurrence.

But the problem to-day is larger. A certain chasm
seems to have opened between the older and the
younger generation in general, A main cause would
seem to be the presumption in favor of the latest as
the best, the newest as the truest. This is deeply
ingrained in the mental habit of our age. At a time
when society was stationary, old men were regarded
as the repositories of ancient wisdom and were ac-
cordingly esteemed. But in a forward-urging time
like ours, young, vigorous, alert men come to the

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OLD AND YOUNG

front. Men who are abreast of the most recent
information are the leaders. In science, for instance,
the latest theories supplant their predecessors. The
textbooks of ten or even five years ago are already
obsolete. It is Einstein, not his great predecessors,
who holds the attention of the physicist.

Everywhere, not only in science and in the techni-
cal arts, the refashioning spirit is abroad, the mood
of disallowance of what has been handed down is
prevalent. And among younger persons especially,
whose desire it is to keep abreast of the times, the
prejudice in favor of every innovation is strong, even
if, unlike scientific theories or new mechanisms, the
innovation is far from being demonstrably an im-
provement.

Thus in education, the innovating spirit has gone
so far as not only to scrape off the barnacles from
the ship and to replace worm-eaten timbers, but
even to eliminate the steering-gear, on the principle,
one must suppose, that a vessel which drifts is more
in tune with its environment of winds and waves
than one that is guided by the compass. The edu-
cational ship to-day is indeed more brightly painted
than ever before, and much that was decayed in it
has been scrapped but the gallant bark is drifting
nobly, nobody knows whither. It is the Montessori
method, or the misnamed Organic method, or some
other most recent method, that is acclaimed in vir-
tue of its recency. Always the method, but hardly
a word about the end, the purpose 1 It is unneces-
sary to mention the many novelties and vagaries

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

that are being introduced in painting and music and
poetry. Here the general tendency is toward the
solution of form, with emphasis on endless varieties
in expression. Doubtless such of these changes as
are mere aberrations will pass away, and in educa-
tion and in the fine arts and in life too, there will,
we may hope, be a new classicism, new binding
forms will be discovered which shall include the
riches that are garnered up by the insurgents and
innovators.

I speak of these things, however, only to indicate
how the passion for the recent reacts on the respect
or want of respect that is shown to the older genera-
tion. Older persons seem belated stragglers, linger-
ers on the way, long outdistanced by the fast moving
throng. They are apt to be regarded as more or
less backward intelligences, interesting perhaps like
geological specimens whose place is in a museum.
Or, to put the thought more gently, Time, in flying
past them, scattered the white dust from its pinions
on their heads, and the same white dust of age had
also descended on their minds. Hence, if they may
still claim an outward deference, and are not actu-
ally to be shelved, it is more from the remembrance
of what they once were than from regard for any
vital significance they may still claim.

But I have thus far touched only upon a cause
that may account for the decline of reverence to-
wards the aged, but does not explain the strain
between the older and the younger generation. The

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OLD AND YOUNG

strain implies antagonism, hostility. And this ap-
pears markedly in the political and social radicalism
of many of the younger people, in their extreme
views on marriage and the defiant rebelliousness
with which they affect to outrage what are consid-
ered the proprieties in dress and manners and social
customs. The rancor, the resentment that is felt
in some of these young hearts to-day, is aptly illus-
trated in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. "In the
first place," says the young author, with a burning
heart, "the older generation has certainly pretty
well ruined this world before passing it on to us.
They gave us this thing knocked to pieces, leaky,
threatening to blow up, and then are surprised if we
do not accept it with decorous enthusiasm. They
turn over their wreck to us." He means, of course,
the war. We of the older generation have been
accustomed to blame the militarists or the imperi-
alists, or this or that faction or party for the wan
The younger generation, seeing the general wreck-
age, refuses to distinguish who in particular is to
blame, but indicts the generation that has been in
charge of the world as a whole, and throws upon us
collectively the responsibility. "You pass over this
leaky, shipwrecked world to us to mend, for us to
bear the burdens of your folly, of your culpable neg-
ligence, and in addition you ask us to respect you.
You ought to be more than grateful," seems to be
the inference, "if we are willing to forgive you and
forget you."

But it is not the state of things created by the

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

war alone that has produced this drastic effect on
thinking young people. They have discovered "rot-
tenness and shortcomings" in all governments, and
even if they do not directly espouse what is called
anarchism, they tend toward anarchistic ideas. They
see "rottenness and shortcomings" too in democracy,
and especially they see the contradiction between
what we profess and what we practice, the hypocrisy
of it all, the universal bluff, the revolting pretense of
virtue, screening vice, greed, and selfishness. Was
there ever a more manifest falsehood, say the young-
sters, for instance, than that the majority rules in
our democracy? Is not every one who looks in the
least below the surface aware of the damning fact
that the majority is manipulated in the interests of
selfish minority cliques, that by a species of ventril-
oquism the voice that really comes from the minority
is projected upon the majority so as to appear to
emanate from them? Does not every one know
by what tricks of propaganda the multitude are in-
duced to adopt opinions not really their own? Yet,
whenever we young people in the name of an ideal-
istic, public-spirited minority, venture to raise our
voice in protest, we are rebuked as anarchists or
radicals, and are told that in America the majority
rules.

But injustice, and the sin of covering up injustice
with hypocrisy, is most keenly resented by the young
in the industrial field. The industrial problem has
long ceased to concern the employers and laborers
alone. It is drawing into its current every social

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OLD AND YOUNG

class, and especially the more generous spirits among
the young. The inequity of the present arrange-
ment is too crying to be ignored ; and it hurts sensi-
tive consciences that have not yet been hardened
by frequent contact with wrong. Thus we have just
read of a young man, heir to a million, who refuses
to touch what he considers the tainted thing. Others,
sons of wealthy families, are endeavoring to equal-
ize their condition, as far as possible, with that of
the poor, and young women, refined and delicately
reared, are leaving their luxurious homes to work
side by side with factory girls in trade organizations;
while even among those who are not actively pro-
testing, the spirit of revolt, the condemnation of
things as they exist, is widespread.

Now if one group of persons pulls in one direc-
tion, and another in exactly the opposite direction,
there is strain; and if the younger generation pulls
with all its might in the direction of changing things,
and the older generation leans back as hard as it
can, and stands for keeping things as they are, then
there is bound to be tremendous tension. This, I
take it, is the situation in all departments of human
life to-day. If there were not urgent need for
change, if things could be kept as they are, there
would be no strain. The younger generation might
pull as hard as it pleases, things would remain stiffly
in their places. Or, if things could be changed as
the younger radicals desire, by a sudden forward
movement all along the line, then also there would
be no strain, since the older generation would have

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

to give way, and the whole world, political and social
and educational, would be remade in the twinkling
of an eye. But as in the nature of things neither
side can wholly prevail, there is and is bound to be
the strain.

What is to be done ? How ease the strain ? How
replace antagonism by mutual understanding? In
the first place, I for one take my stand in sympathy
and appreciation on the side of the younger genera-
tion. In the spirit of youth we have the precious
force on which we must draw for the betterment of
things. There must be improvement. The fresh,
unspoiled energy and hopefulness of youth, even
though it be extravagant, is our chief reliance. I
know of no sadder spectacle than that of a youth
who sets out in life with fine ideals and presently
capitulates, surrenders his ideals as illusions, and
becomes as hard in his heart as the business machine
into which he fits himself. The idealism of youth,
even despite its aberrations, is priceless. If only
they knew how much we value them, not condescend-
ingly tolerate them, but look forward to what they
can do with intense expectation that would be the
first step toward a good understanding.

Then, as the next essential step, we must con-
vince them that we really care as much as they do
for ideal and feasible changes, if indeed we care,
for if we do not there can be no mutual understand-
ing. But if we do care, as at least many of us do,

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OLD AND YOUNG

it is for us to convince them that we do, and also to
convince them that only by joint efforts of the older
and the younger, can desirable changes be brought
about, and that the older persons too have some-
thing indispensable to contribute.

As against the extreme and unwarranted indict-
ment of the younger generation we can put in the
following plea. First, they are wrong in fastening
the blame for the world-cataclysm upon their imme-
diate predecessors, on us whom they call the older
generation. Not one generation only is 'to blame.
All the generations that have preceded us con-
tributed their errors, their crimes, their blundering
gropings, to bring to pass this world disaster. The
life of humanity is continuous. The human race
may be compared to a single Titan, a Prometheus,
who struggles not to steal the divine fire out of the
heavens above, but to kindle it in himself, with a
view to civilizing himself. And the fire and the
clay in his nature are ever at war with each other.
He fails tragically, hideously and then he tries
again. To contrast the younger and the older gen-
eration as isolated factors opposed to each other is
shortsighted. The contrast is between the latest
comers and all those who previously have toiled on
the difficult upward march.

In the next place democracy, however crude in
its workings, is after all a gain compared with the
rule of kings, and wage-slavery means progress as
compared with serfdom. To be sure I shall not

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

insist on this point, since any kind of slavery is slav-
ery still, and majority rule is often blind tyranny no
less than king rule. The evil in both is still so pre-
ponderant that to compare it with those still worse
forms of evil that preceded has the appearance of
somehow by indirection justifying the evil. But
what I insist on is that there is a permanent, unceas-
ing good enshrined in institutions which in other
respects stand condemned. And we of the older gen-
eration must stand for saving and perpetuating this
good. That is our special function, the way in which
we indispensably contribute to the improvement of
human society. We save the net gain of Prome-
theus's struggles in the past, we prevent, as the
saying is, the child from being spilled with the bath,
and to this end we are to pacify the petulance of
the young and correct the sweeping verdicts in which
they indulge. Only we must remember, that the
good can be saved only by being developed into the
better. Thus we can save the democratic principle
only by making it more truly democratic, by express-
ing democracy in forms which are far more in accord
than the present with its fine inward purpose. And
we can save the principle of initiative and individu-
ality which is characteristic of the present social sys-
tem only by making initiative and power in one life
consistent with and provocative of initiative and
power in all others.

And here I am led to revert once more to the
subject of marriage. Some years ago Max Nordau

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OLD AND YOUNG

wrote a book on "The Conventional Lies of Our
Civilization." In it there is a chapter on the "mar-
riage lie," setting forth the contradiction between the
ideal of marriage and marriage as it is actually lived.
And the hypocritical attitude of society in regard
to marriage arouses the indignation of the young,
who see the extent of irresponsible relations outside
of marriage, the enormity of the social evil in the
great cities, the temptations put in the way of the
daughters of the poor, the tacit connivance at sex
transgressions so long as they are kept under cover,
and the sharp executioners ax of social ostracism
that falls as soon as the wretched secret is divulged.
The outward seeming is fair, say the young critics,
and the exterior of the sepulcher is kept carefully
white, but within it is filled with filth and corruption.
And, even where this is not the case, in the so-called
Philistine marriages, what grossness, what sodden
spiritual stagnation I Suppose this were all true (as
by the testimony of experience it is not), still the
theory of the conventional lie is the greatest lie of
all, in that it represents as a social convention that
which is a social necessity, and generalizes and im-
putes to all what is true, miserably enough, in part.
The marriage institution and custom, as we have in-
herited it, is a casket that contains a priceless gem,
namely, the idea of the unity of two lives, for
the sake of achieving, through their inseparable
union, the unity of the children's lives with their
own.

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

But this precious good enshrined in marriage
must indeed be developed into a better. The unity
in the past was based on the subordination of the
woman's will and mind to the man's, subordination
being the readiest method of consummating oneness.
The development of the unity depends on the per-
fect recognition of an independent mind and will
on either side, and on the respect paid to the poten-
tial spiritual independence of the child. It is vastly
more difficult to relate independent personalities
so that harmony shall exist among them, but it is
also a spiritual task worthy of supremest endeavor.
The solution, therefore, is not to propose I know not
what impossible alternative to marriage, or to de-
ride it because its ideal has never been realized, and
because some people pharisaically cloak with the
ideal their very real derelictions, but rather to pre-
sent the ideal in a way corresponding to the new and
indefeasible claims of independence for woman and
offspring, so that it may have a better prospect of
being realized, and in particular to be wholly re^
solved to realize it to the utmost extent possible in
one's own relations.

The older and the younger generation will under-
stand each other when they both take the attitude
of learners, when both are forward-looking, when
both long for the better human society. The older
must convince the younger that they appreciate
what the younger can contribute their unspent
vigor, their intensity, their unwillingness to tolerate

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OLD AND YOUNG

shams, while they must affirm, in no uncertain voice,
that they themselves, the older generation, cannot
be spared in the work of reconstruction, and that
without the salvation of what is valuable in the acqui-
sitions of the past, the task of the young Titans will
be abortive. The young will be glad to learn from
those who themselves are learners. That spell never
fails.

There are also certain minor and yet important
services in respect to manners and social behavior
which the initiate can render to the novices. There
is at present much studied defiance of conventions
by the younger generation, the deliberate intent to
outrage the proprieties and to startle those who
adhere to them. No doubt such escapades as mid-
night automobile rides on lonely country roads may
be perfectly harmless, and young persons who are
self-respecting may preserve their respect for one
another, no matter under what perilous circum-
stances. At the same time, while some of the social
conventions are artificial, and might well be done
away with, others are valuable safeguards; and the
absence of them, as is shown by reports of recent
occurrences in certain coeducational colleges of the
West, should be a warning as to the peril of neglect-
ing them.

There are who ask not if Thine eye
Be on them; who, in love and truth,
Where no misgiving is, rely
Upon the genial sense of youth;
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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

Glad Hearts I without reproach or blot;
Who do Thy work, and know it not;
Long may the kindly impulse last!
But Thou, if they should totter, teach them
to stand fasti

And it is not the sense of duty alone, but certain
safeguards of duty, that will aid them to stand fast.
For we human beings are compact of soul and sense,
and it is just the idealists who are apt to be over-
confident of their strength. They do not measure
the force of those torrential passions which some-
times suddenly overwhelm the firmest. They may
not meet with utter moral disaster, but they are
likely to receive moral wounds, unnecessary revela-
tions of their own weaknesses that will leave their
scars for life. It is best to avoid certain occasions.
Ulysses had himself bound to the mast when he
passed the perilous islands whence the seductive song
was wafted towards him. I do not believe in the
kind of surveillance that implies distrust by others,
but I do believe in prescribing bounds, in being to a
certain extent distrustful of oneself, and even if not
that, at least in accepting binding ties for the sake
of the weaker ones who require the maintenance of
a general rule.

In regard to women's garb, I wish also to say a
few words. For has not Carlyle in his "Sartor
Resartus" established it once for all that there is a
philosophy of clothes, and that the subject is not

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OLD AND YOUNG

unworthy of a philosopher, or of the one who, how-
ever humbly, aspires in that direction? In the mat-
ter of garbing the human figure there is at present
a tangle of ideas that ought to be disentangled, and
that not only among the young, but among those
who cannot with any scientific precision be classed
under that head. For instance, it is argued that the
rules of decorum in dress are purely arbitrary, since,
in certain countries it is considered indecorous to
have the head uncovered; or again, that while the
Head must be covered, the feet must be bare, espe-
cially in sanctuaries. But these are tabus, and their
connection with religious superstitions is easily
traceable. It was believed that the supernatural
spirits would somehow be offended by the covering
or the uncovering. This argument, therefore, does
not touch the seemliness or unseemliness of garbing
which we are considering. It has no place in a
philosophy of clothes.

Again, the example of the undraped human figure
in art is cited as though it were pertinent. But, as
I have said, man is compound of soul and sense ; and
the human figure, as it is presented in art, appeals
to the soul and the apprehension of beauty; it leads
through the sense upward, and thus tranquillizes and
subdues the senses. The human figure in art is never
a mere individual, but type and individual both. It
is the particular elevated into the universal, and
hence it has a kind of hallowing effect. Like the
presence in the flaming bush, it imposes distance and
aloofness upon the beholden It speaks: Come not

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

too nigh; the ground whereon thou treadest is
ethereal. The example drawn from art, therefore,
does not apply to the living, breathing individuals
whom we meet in daily intercourse.

Mr. Seton Thompson was once reported in the
newspapers as approving the modern fashions of
women's dress, as a movement in the direction of
a return to the innocence of the South Sea Islanders.
I fancy that he spoke ironically, or must have been
misreported. For the state of innocence, either of
young children or of primitive peoples, is that of
beings who have not yet acquired the sense of a
distinctive personality of their own, and the civi-
lized peoples are those who have more or less ac-
quired that consciousness. The custom of garbing
the person is evidence of the sense of personality.
We withdraw from public gaze as a profanation
whatever is intimate. You may think, for instance,
that the face of a man or a woman is open to every
one's inspection, but it is not so. To the casual
passer-by, or even to the more distant acquaintance,
the face is often an impenetrable screen not reveal-
ing the inner thought or purpose at all, but rather
concealing it. And even where this is not so, the
face of a highly developed man or woman only
allows those expressions of the inner life to pass
outward which concern the more general social rela-
tions; while it is in the circle of the most intimate
friends only, of the dearest, the most cherished, the
most congenial companions, that the soul advances
from its recesses to its gate, that the love-light is

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OLD AND YOUNG

kindled in the eye, that the facial expression sheds
forth fully and freely the riches that have been
kept from the unintimate or the uncongenial. Thus
even the face, though it is uncovered, is in fact cov-
ered wherever the sense of personality is pro-
nounced, wherever the man or the woman is truly
civilized. Civilization and the sense of personality
go together. Whatever is connected with intimate
relations is desecrated by being exhibited to the
public gaze.

In normal times, when the customs ofsociety are
more or less settled, these things can be left to
the finer instincts, to their sure though unconscious
tactful guidance in discriminating between what is
seemly and unseemly. But in this transitional age of
ours when the finer instincts, and the conventions,
good and bad alike, are being questioned, reasons
must be given. I think the reasons I have here
given should suffice. The sense of personality sup-
plies the criterion by which to judge between that
which is purely artificial and that which is grounded
in the spiritual nature of human beings.

In science the newest is apt to be the truest, be-
cause the data accumulate, and more elaborate meth-
ods of experimentation lead to the discovery of
previously unknown laws. In the sphere of conduct,
nothing of the kind is the case. There experience
counts, and judgment, which is slower to ripen than
knowledge or technical skill and which comes with
the years. And most of all wisdom counts; wis-
dom which springs from the baffling of effort, which

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

wrests from defeat the prize of victory, which finds
after every thwarted effort the perennial impulse
whence springs the courage to new effort. Such wis-
dom the young world reconstructed will need, for
they too will be baffled, as we have been.

The conclusion of it all is that everything depends
on the right attitude. Authority simply no longer
counts. If a father complains that he is not rever-
enced, he must realize that he cannot coerce rexer-
ence, but only win it by proving himself worthy of
it. If in the home the man thinks himself at liberty
to give vent to his impetuosities because he is, after
all, the head, he must realize that he will be cen-
sured, if not overtly, then silently, by those who
concede to fathers no such wretched privilege. If
he is a hard taskmaster in his mill, he will raise up
against himself the protest of his own flesh and
blood, of those sons and daughters of his who have
begun to scent in the morning air of mankind the
fragrance of a better order.

The strain between the older and the newer gen-
eration will disappear when both take the attitude
of learners; when neither the one nor the other
insists on the particular claims and rights of their
generation, but jointly look ahead towards the gen-
erations and generations that are to come and jointly
strive to prepare for their coming.

VII

THE ETHICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS
THE DEPARTED

THE frequent inadequacy of language to express
meanings is forcibly brought home to one in
seeking a word to designate the friends no longer
with us. Shall we say "the dead"? But dead means
utterly gone. "Utterness" is its characteristic in its
widest as well as its narrowest use. Shall we say
"the defunct," that is, those who have ceased to
function? Shall we say "the deceased," the de-
parted? The German language has an advantage
in the word selig (blessed). A German can speak
of his father as my blessed father. The French also
have the word feu, which, by the way, has no con-
nection with fire, but with the Latin fatum, meaning
those who have accomplished their fate, their des-
tiny. Montesquieu says "Feu ma mere" In English,
perhaps the word "departed" is the least objection-
able.

Looking back on human history there are two
striking phenomena that stand out preeminent. One
is the instinctive unwillingness of men to admit an-
nihilation, the tenacious affirmation of the persistence
in some form of those who have disappeared from
the scene. Curiously, even the materialist pays hom-

INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

age to this notion of persistence by asserting, with
apparent satisfaction, that the elements of which
the body is composed, as atoms at least, remain in-
destructible. The other phenomenon alluded to is
the fervid desire of the survivors to do something
for the departed to show them love love ever ex-
hibiting itself in the desire to benefit the beloved
object. It is this trait that explains the labor and
expense lavished on the tombs of the ancient Egyp-
tian kings, one of which, that of Tutankhamen, has
recently been opened after over three thousand
years. The treasure it contains, the costly furnish-
ings, are evidence of the desire to minister to the
comfort and to mark the lofty station of the king,
who in some sense was supposed still to inhabit the
dark chamber.

The funeral rites described in the Iliad, designed
as they were to speed the journey of the departed
hero to the land of shades, bear similar testimony.
Likewise in every Roman Catholic Church the
masses said for the repose of the souls are evidence
in point, as also the mourners 1 prayer Kaddish
repeated by the Jew for an entire year, and there-
after on every anniversary of a parent's death.

There is a third phenomenon in connection with
this subject that should not be overlooked, namely,
the almost inconceivable tendency to keep up illu-
sions about graves, and about those who are sup-
posed to sleep in them, illusions that fly straight in
the face of the facts. The very notion of the loved

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TOWARDS THE DEPARTED

one as resting in the grave is a pathetic trick of
fancy. That which lies in the grave is plainly not
the beloved person, is no person at all, but a decay-
ing organism, on the actual condition of which the
mind may not dwell. Why then speak of the friend
as "sleeping" in the grave? Why keep up this false
notion ? Is it merely a caprice of the poetic imagin-
ation ? Even as such it would not be entirely harm-
less. But there is plenty of evidence that poetic
metaphor is too often taken literally. Sentimental
people seem to feel that they are nearer to the one
they have lost at the particular spot where what is
perishable in him is in process of perishing, than
they would be elsewhere ; and so a kind of cultus of
the grave arises which is sometimes shocking in its
consequences. I remember the case of a woman
who, after she had lost her only daughter, visited the
grave day after day, neglecting her home duties,
making a hideous travesty of grief, haunting the
cemetery, clinging to the turf. This, of course, is
an extreme example, but it illustrates sentimentality
usurping the place of genuine sentiment. It brings
out that wrong turn of feeling, of which we have
also many milder instances. What matters is pre-
cisely to turn the feelings in the opposite direction
from that which is perishable and which is bound
to perish, to that which is, if there be any such thing
as we hope to find there is, imperishable.

Of course the average human mind is incapable
of conceiving that anything exists which cannot be
touched or seen, and so the average individual finds

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

himself in the following dilemma. His instinct leads
him to believe that his friend cannot be wholly gone.
But the friend being invisible, the mind fastens, con-
trary to the plain facts, on the body of the friend,
as if it were somehow living, only asleep. Or when
attention is diverted from the grave as the abode
of the friend, there still remains the incapacity to
think of him otherwise than bodily, and so in im-
agination he is invested with an attenuated body, a
body which is as little body as possible but still
body. The friend becomes what is called a spirit,
but what is really a ghost, a thing floating some-
where in upper air, no one knows where.

In any case it is best, as soon as possible after the
death of that which dies, to think of that which lives.
And for this reason the practice of cremation is com-
mendable, since it hastens the process of dissolution
by the pure ministry of flame, and at once and en-
tirely causes to disappear that which no longer can
be visible or palpable.

At the present day, however, one cannot help no-
ticing a radical change in the world in regard to
people's attitude toward the departed. The too
close clinging to the visible self of the friend is be-
coming the exception. The instinctive belief, if it
be, as I think, instinctive, in the persistence of some-
thing imperishable in the friend is, at least tempo-
rarily, becoming weakened, and instead the waters
of oblivion are allowed to close over the departed
and the memory of the departed. The quick forget-

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TOWARDS THE DEPARTED

"out of sight, out of mind" seems to be be-
coming more general.

The reasons for this change of attitude are not
far to seek. One is the mad speed of modern life.
We have not the time to remember those who have
gone. We have hardly the time for self-recollection.
The pace is too dizzy. We cannot stand still. For-
merly, when a funeral passed through the streets,
with measured step to solemn music, the passers-by
stopped, bared the head in token of respect. Nowa-
days one hardly notices a funeral there are so
many that rush by; and since the auto hearse has
come into use, the dead themselves seem, as it were,
to be caught in the general whirl of movement, im-
patient to hurry on.

Again, the feeling largely prevails that a man has
only this one life to live, that he too will presently
be carried off the scene, and therefore that it is the
part of wisdom to make the most of this brief ex-
istence while one has it, and not to cloud the present
sunshine with the shadows of sad remembrance. Or
again, in some cases, there is a sort of depreciation
of the older generation by the younger, a sort of
irreverence for the past that tends to sweep out of
mind the memory of older persons who have passed
away, who belong to the past. They were regarded
as backward while they still lived; why should one
care to remember them particularly when they are
no longer present? The recent stupendous progress
in science and invention has contributed to this feel-
ing. The science of to-day is far in advance of the

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

science even of yesterday. Textbooks of ten years
ago are already obsolete, and modern inventiveness
is registering achievements beyond the dreams even
of our recent predecessors.

Yet the same is not true of character and human
worth. The man in the street to-day, the average
American, for instance, just as a man, does not com-
pare with the noble, rounded characters of antiquity
the great Greeks and Romans, the great figures of
Hebrew prophecy, the fine types of the Renaissance,
and at least certain ones among the fathers of our
Republic. And even among the unscientific and hum-
bler parents of the present generation there may be
examples of human excellence which it is not well
to ignore, nor to commit to the dust-bin of forget-
fulness.

These are general considerations. There are
also more specific motives that conduce to the pres-
ent change of attitude the wish to forget, the in-
vocation of oblivion. Sometimes the loss is so keenly
felt by the survivors that they shrink from mention-
ing the name in conversation. The wound is still
too sensitive, the grief too poignant, the vacancy in
the home circle too recent. In this way the habit of
silence with regard to the departed is formed, and
the 'months pass, and the years pass, and the silence
continues, until inevitably the image of the departed
becomes dim.

Or again, a man exceptionally devoted to his wife
cannot bear to think of the loss of her, and forcibly

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TOWARDS THE DEPARTED

to distract himself, plunges into work, deliberately
lets himself be absorbed in work. And thus, again
in time, a habit is formed, the feelings become lesa
painful indeed, but also the thought of the lost one
grows more faint,

- In many families among the best people I have
noticed that the remembrance of fathers and grand-
fathers, still vivid in my own recollection, to all
appearance at least has been blotted out. Also I
am a member of a cluS of scholars, very limited in
number, in close relations for many years. One of
our members, whom we very greatly respected, died
a few years ago. I do not think that I have heard
his name mentioned among us a single time since
then. Why this silence, if it does not mean "Let
the dead bury their dead"?

But there is another situation of which we must
have the courage to speak. The silence may be due
to the fact that the person who has gone was ob-
jectionable, that one does not wish to think of him,
that one has not so much grief as a grievance, which
has not been purged out of one's heart. And there-
fore, in order not to rake up the embers of old
hatreds, old misunderstandings, it is thought best
to let the recollection of the one who has gone go
with him, deliberately to forget.

But it is time to end this review, and to consider
the ethical attitude towards the departed. What
should it be ideally? How shall it be defined? It
is to be defined in relation to the task of mankind on

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

this earth the task of mankind as a whole, and
hence also of every human being. That task is
progress toward the more perfect society, the eth-
ically perfect society, toward the incarnation of the
spiritual principle in human society, the principle
which bids us live in promoting life, instead of living
as the beasts do, at the expense of other life. To
ethicize human relationships is the task. And the
way we are to think of the departed one is as of
one whose duty and destiny it was to aid in this
great human business of ethical progress.* What
did he accomplish, what valuable qualities had he
which deserve to be transmitted, to be perpetuated
by ourselves, the survivors? What seeds of good
were in him which require to be further developed?
What light did his failures as well as his aspirations
shed upon the spiritual possibilities of man?

Bearing this in mind, we must at the same time
strictly determine to deal with actualities, for in*
stance not to pretend that the departed have always
been good or that they may not have been common-
place from the world's point of view, nonentities,
or that they have not left stings behind which one
finds it hard to extract from one's consciousness.
The question is : How can one apply the ethical atti-
tude in the three situations just mentioned ?

There are bad lives. Some of the departed have

Just as we hallow marriage by thinking of the relation in
which the life of the past streams through the married couple into
the life of the future, to be purified and enhanced as it passes, so
we hallow our relation to the departed by the like orientation to-
wards the future goal of mankind.

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TOWARDS THE DEPARTED

lived bad lives. Not indeed absolutely bad no
human being is absolutely bad. But it may happen
that a son is unfortunate enough to inherit a name
which his father has disgraced. What is his duty?
To atone for his father, to expiate the offense not
merely from a sense of pride to clear the family
escutcheon, not merely in order that he may hold
his head erect, despite his bearing the once dishon-
ored but now by him honored name. The deeper
thought is: humanity retrograded in your father, it
is for you, the son, to recover the ground lost by
humanity. That this is not a fanciful notion, but an
effectual motive, not a few notable examples prove.
There are commonplace lives. On the occasion
of the funeral obsequies the officiating speaker, ask-
ing for particulars about the departed, is not infre-
quently met with the embarrassed remark that there
is nothing particular to be said. There were no
events of special interest that marked his life, there
are no outstanding qualities to be pointed to. To
me at least, I am bound to say, it is just such a life
that is most appealing the life in which the pos-
sibilities existed, but were never actualized. It is
not the so-called important events, it is not what a
man has done as a citizen, or as a philanthropist,
that really impress me. They do not impress me so
much because they are surface manifestations, be-
cause it is at least possible that a man may have
been distinguished in that way, and yet have been
unspiritual, unfine at the core. I do not, of course,
mean to imply that public spirit and manifest virtue

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

are inconsistent with a high type of spirituality* I
insist that the one does not necessarily imply the
other.

And further, in regard to these commonplace lives,
there is always something that demands expression,
especially the basic human relationships of father,
mother, brother, and the like. These afford a text
to dwell upon. These challenge comment and eu-
logy. The relationships themselves should be eulo-
gized. The beauty that is implicit in them should
be conjured up, even if the departed person diet
not fulfill the role of the ideal father, or the hus-
band, or the brother, or what not. Who ever does
live up to the ideal? Yet he suggested that ideal.
The very relation in which he stood to the survivor
evokes the ideal from its hidden depth.

At the funeral the object should be to lead those
present to take in the whole of the life that has here
ended. We see one another by fits and starts, we
get glimpses of each other's personality. We rarely
see even those with whom we are constantly asso-
ciated, in their totality. The moment when they
go from us is the time to fix their memory, to draw
a mental portrait of them, as it were, and to place
it in the gallery of memory. But especially the
basic human relationships and their sacred meaning
is the topic on which one may dwell.

I have said that there are bad lives which should
be expiated, and that there are also commonplace
lives, in which, however, the human relationships
stand out prominently; and that what is implicit in

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TOWARDS THE DEPARTED

these relations may be made explicit. Expiation
and explication are the first two points significant of
the ethical attitude.

In the next place there are cases in which the
remembrance of the departed is difficult for the
survivor because of friction, of misunderstanding.
For instance, there are two brothers rone is scien-
tifically minded, the other religiously minded. The
one makes almost a fetish of scientific exactness, and
Ijas little respect for those intellectual and moral
activities in which the mind is constrained to grope
for certainty without attaining more than approxi-
mation the difference involved being that between
the sphere in which the relation of cause and effect
predominates and the sphere in which the relation
of means to an end predominates. The consequence
of the disparity in temperament and intellectual out-
look between the two brothers is felt throughout
their lives. Natural affection remains the bond, holds
them together. But in a way the very closeness
of the tie which is. never relaxed only accentuates
the painfulness of the intellectual uncongeniality.
The one brother dies. What shall be the ethical
attitude of the other? I have said above that
on the occurrence of death, the survivor should
draw the mental portrait of the departed as he was.
I now go much further and say, the survivor should
draw the spiritual image as the departed would have
been if his nature had been ideally completed in
the instance mentioned, as he would have been if,
beyond his honorable scientific conscientiousness he

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

had also embraced the ideal of perfection as it is
seized by the religious mind. The spiritual image
thus completed will then react upon the survivor, will
have the effect upon him of supplementing his nature
on the scientific side, where it needs to be supple-
mented.

We have thus three leadings that mark the ethical
attitude expiation, explication, supplementation.

I mentioned in the beginning the instinctive un-
willingness of mankind to admit annihilation, the in-
stinctive impulse to affirm continuity of some sort,
and ^o to wish to do something for the benefit of
the olloved who are no longer with us. Continuity,
in my account of the ethical attitude, is now defined
in terms of influence. The continuity of the life
that is no longer visibly present, is in its influence on
the survivor.* And the relation is not unilateral, as
some think, the remembrance benefiting us, while we
cannot benefit the departed. We benefit them by
completing their spiritual image.!

The ethically perfect society is the goal, but thisf
goal, you will remind me, is never attained. True,
but the increasing vision of the perfect spiritual so-

+ This presupposes the sovereign conception of the task of hu-
manity, that is, of progress toward the ethically perfect society. If
this terminus ad quern, this goal, be ruled out, then the influence is a
transient phenomenon, a wave that rises and subsides, and to speak
of persistence in connection with it is illegitimate.

fThat is, by idealizing them. Idealizing, however, must be
strictly distinguished from idolizing. Idolizing is to represent the
departed as if they were perfect, which no human beings are.
Idealizing is the sublime work of the imagination, to represent
them as they would be with their deficiencies transcended.

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TOWARDS THE DEPARTED

ciety is attained and in that vision the reality of
what man is. in essence, now and in all eternity.
This being so, a final word is required on the subject
of immortality.

I have repeatedly made my confession of faith as
to this point. It comprises two statements. There
is in man an essence, an infinitesimal of the infinite,
as such imperishable. The characteristic attribute
of this essence is that it is a life, not a thing, not
static, but dynamic; and that its life consists in act-
ing upon and enhancing other life, quickening and
being quickened. Hence the spiritual tie, the tie that
binds spiritual beings, is inseparable in all eternity.

In connection with this, however, two difficulties
must be confronted. Of what avail is it to say that
my departed beloved one exists, if I can hav& no
notion of the manner of his or her existence since
pure being, existence, unclothed with the grace of
form, the swe6t expression of the eye, the tender
touch of the hand, is distant and blank? As well
non-existence, some ardent lover might say. My
answer here is similar to that of the theist. All the
profound theistic thinkers have declared their belief
that God, the one individual (j&d, is unknowable,
that man can form no notion of what he is in him-
self, or of how he lives, that he can be known only
through his effects, which are supposed to be, in his
case the creation and government of the world.
Similarly we can know the spiritual essence of the
departed, which is a part of the eternal life only

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INCOMPATIBILITY IN MARRIAGE

through its effects. And these effects we must ex
perience. The chief effect is reverence for man, for
all men, for oneself, because of the divine essence
that inhabits men. And the other, no less uplifting
effect, is the sense of indestructible and insunderable
connection with our fellow spirits.

But Here the last objection arises. For suppose a
husband married to a woman upon whom his whole
soul is anchored, whom he cannot let go, the light
of his life, and who by death is taken from him.
Is there not a difficuty in the fact that the spiritual,
inseparable connection beyond death, irrespective of
deatn, is a connection with an infinite number of spir-
itual beings, arid not just with this one beloved?
And is not love exclusive? Does not love repel the
idea of a similar intimacy with any except the one,
the counterpart, the excellent friend of the soul, the
comrade, the more than comrade? True, but why
in our earthly life this exclusi veness ? Because close-
ness is repugnant where there is not the intimate con-
geniality, and because intimate congeniality, the
subtle understanding, the subtle adaptation, the har-
monious flow of life in the world in which we live
is impossible except between two nay, if the point
be pressed, is never absolutely perfect even between
the two. But, on the other hand, the very notion of
the ideal, eternal community is of a community in
which there is infinite congeniality, in which the in-
finite possible sides of our being seek and find infinite
complementation, in which there is no screen hiding
us from any of our fellow-spirits, in wHich we know

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all and are known of all as essentially we are, in
which there is a perfect flow of life in life between
all.

The Gospel says that in Heaven there is neither
marriage nor giving in marriage. What I here say
of marriage is that it is the earthly symbol of the
infinite and universal union of spirits. And what
furthermore I say is that the highest good which a
man can receive from the woman he loves is that she
shall enlighten his eyes to see the infinite relations of
being, that she shall be to him the revealer of the
eternal world, that she shall appear to him not only
as the particular star of his life, but disclose* to him
the infinite galaxy that envelops her.

(o

THE END