The Myth in Marriage

								

away.
Ecstacy continued, burns up life, and is not intended except for
inspiration.
Love may continue with marriage, and it may not. Civilization has drifted
us into conditions where it is difficult for romance to continue after the
lovers enter into the business of life together.
Marriage is of universal interest. The weal or woe of the race is involved
in it.
It is a natural incident in the lives of lovers; but the marriage of
lovers, although an incident in love, becomes an event in their lives
because of the business partnership, which phase they did not contemplate.
The primal purpose in the marriage of lovers is that they may be
perpetually purified, that they may live constantly their best. To do
this they must have the Ideal forever before them.
When the business part of marriage shows another "side" of their natures,
the Ideal may take wings. Then they naturally feel they are cheated. Their
first impulse is to run away from this "trouble," to get back to the Ideal
before it has been effaced.

AN AWAKENING



    Love, indeed, is light from heaven;

    A spark of that immortal fire by Allah given.--Byron.

The expressions, "falling in love," and "making love," are terms
suggesting something that is impossible.
No one falls in love. The experience of loving may come when a person has
evolved where fine perceptions are possible. All living is an awakening
process in which there are many degrees of consciousness. At a certain
stage in his evolution, a human being is able to see and feel certain
truth.
The imagination is a power which is developed with intellect and fine
feeling. The imagination can create a world and people it. In this way,
ideals are perpetually made. Humanity's effort to realize ideals is
evolution.
When man can image a human being that fulfils the highest ideal he can
create, the soul rejoices. Man forgets the imperfect in his ecstacy when
contemplating the perfect. And when one human being sees another human
being who reminds him, more or less, of his ideal, he is said to love.
He does not "fall" nor "make," he realizes, he awakens, and sometimes
re-creates.
It may often occur that the person who awakens one to this ideal may
recall this ideal once, twice, again and yet again. Or this person may
constantly recall it, or cease altogether to recall it.
That man and woman are lovers who constantly keep before each other the
Ideal.
They wish to abide together, because together they live their best lives,
do their best work, are most kind to their fellow-man, do no wrong, can do
no wrong. This is commonly accepted today as the basis of marriage. It is
this ideal which is vaguely or definitely in the minds of thinking people
when they wish to marry.
The poet Dante had a wonderful, complete ideal. He saw but twice the woman
who reminded him of his Perfect. He wrote in poetry of his Ideal and
called Her by this woman's name.