IMPLIES LIBERTY IN LOVE.

53

mits that this grafting, or regeneration, is a fact of free grace, and as it penetrates man from his internal to his external, and humanity from the individual soul to the social mass, it is an absolutely spontaneous and not at all a mere moral fact, and all the conduct which flows from it, or which it spontaneously determines in the acts and relations formed by the regenerate Christian, are the natural forms of this spiritual state; the control of which from without by social laws or morals, is utterly unwarranted, absurd, and pernicious. If, then, the state and church use an unwarrantable violence in imposing any arbitrary system of love ties whatsoever on the regenerate Christian, who carries the spiritual law within him, a fortiori, they are doubly absurd in hypothecating a system appropriate only to the regenerate Christian, and forcibly imposing it on the unregenerate or natural man, to whom different customs are appropriate, and who reacts by his vital elasticity against this passional compression and interference with the natural order of his developments, by secret evasions, hypocrisy, and crime. This argument is perfectly unanswerable, except by assuming the position of the Catholic church, which denies the right of private judgment, and makes the salvation or regeneration of the individual soul to depend, not on the immediate inspiration or mediation from the spirit world, but on the mediate inspiration of the church, and the pope as head of the church, to which and whom it enjoins uncompromising obedience and self abnegation, both intellectual and passional.

The Protestant is confounded by his own inconsistency at the very threshold of his attempt to invalidate the spontaneity of love or to subordinate it to civil authority. The old fashioned Catholic and partisan of religious despotism can alone enter the discussion. With him I decline it, because he is not a true man, having renounced the fundamental ground of his manhood or individuality in slavish obedience, and because he is moreover merely a myth, the historic shadow of a fallen dynasty.*

* I am far from intending to say this of all who call themselves Catholics. Jesuit. ical and Papal authority has been so profoundly shaken within the last half century, that one scarcely knows where to find the Catholic church that is not more than half Protestant without suspecting it.

CHAPTER II.

THE SUPERFLUOUS EVILS OF OUR PRESENT MARRIAGE SYSTEM.

BEFORE one word on this subject, I caution every reader against a private and personal application of what I say. I am not writing a moral treatise for the conduct of individuals in the present society. The morality and policy of action is here fixed and settled. The centripetal law is in full force and every one is bound under pain of disgrace, hypocrisy, or villany, to obey the laws and customs of the society in which he lives; consequently, while the laws remain as they are in a representative and popular government, and the tone of public opinion what it is, and the present social institutions, separated households, individual competition, etc., are in full play, it is folly, or worse, to attempt to carry through love relations in any other form than that of marriage. Even the degree of license accorded by Swedenborg, i. e., kept mistresses, seems to be incompatible with the tone of society in America, and whatever inconveniences it may subject us to, it is neither right nor expedient to try to win a woman's love or her person with any other views than those of marriage. Every individual license. or transgression of morality on this point is a retrograde impulse to society; it must be corrected, and the transgressors brought back to the social standard of right, before society, collectively, through its laws and customs, can advance to the organization of a higher truth. God forbid I should confuse any mind about what is right to be done or to be let alone where we now stand, but after full and unreserved acquiescence in the established laws and customs so long as they shall continue, I claim in turn the most absolute liberty to discuss the rectitude and expediency of those laws and customs themselves, and to modify public opinion on questions of vital interest to me and

NO INDIVIDUAL REBELLION.

55

every other man, with all the force of intellect and character I can bring to bear on it.

My aim is the same with that of the established law and custom, i. e., the reign of good order, decency, and general well-being, but I accuse our present methods as defective, and propose others for public adoption, either to society in mass or to such persons as choose to combine in forming a colony with a soil, a government, and social institutions all its own. A free state on the globe, whose standard of morals shall not be subject to dictation from any external power.

The individual man or woman is bound by the morals or customs of the age and society in which their lot is cast, and persecution-how relentless Shelley's case may prove-attends those who assert in their lives any new fact. One may believe devoutly all I say in this book, and yet find it necessary to marry in order to escape a worse alternative; my object is not to excite isolated individuals to rebel against the law of the land and public opinion, but to modify public opinion itself, and urge to the enaction of more liberal statutes, granting divorce freely wherever the party desiring it renounces all claim upon the property of the other party, and can satisfy the court that children born of the woman are provided for decently.

There are doubtless a few Aspasias and Ninons, women of wonderful fascination, plausibility, and talents for intrigue, who do nearly what they please in any society, and make the fashion and honor of the day move around them. Other women may in vain attempt to imitate such flights, nor is it desirable they should. The order of social movement pursues its course, whether barbaric, civilized, or harmonic, little modified by the eccentricities of a few individual characters who pass like comets across its orbit. Freedom in love without the necessity of underhand intrigues and duplicity of conduct, can exist only when public opinion is liberal and courteous, and demands the combination of persons prepared for nobler and more delicate relations than those which now obtain.

Let not the marriage question be obscured or complicated

56

GOD WANTS NO HELP

by the considerations of free love, as organized or dependent on future industrial and social arrangements. The arbitrary permanence attached by the law to this exclusive civil tie generates many of the worst evils of our present society; and its non-interference would greatly conduce to friendly and Christian relations, diminish the sum of crimes and sufferings, and conduce to public order as well as to individual well-being.

Let lovers, desiring union, unite in the name of the God of love, and not in the name of a God of constraint, who fears the goodness of his own work, and calls on the civil law to give a force and permanence which he was unable to bestow by the power of attraction. God has well done all that He has done. If He wishes your union to be permanent, He has provided for it in the distribution of your passional affinities. If He means that it should be exclusive, the same inherent tendencies of your nature will secure this, without the intervention of compulsory laws. The aim of laws and of moral conventions, rightly understood, is to remove accidental obstructions to the free and spontaneous movement of our native impulsions, and to facilitate their refined and harmonious development; obviating causes of collision between individuals by their true corelation in society. How different this from our absurd attempts to compress and repress the passions on all sides by our penal codes, which, at last, only multiply offenders and offenses.

God needs no assistance from our law-makers to patch over His mistakes in the distribution of your attractions and instincts, Are your affinities such as are calculated to unite you only for a season-for a single phase of life and love, ardent but ephemeral, like the contact of electric points, vanishing into that passional ether which our souls breathe, as our lungs the atmosphere, before we have had time to analyze them? Accept joyfully this present happiness in each other, remembering that your whole life here is in its highest possible truth and beauty only a moment in the eternity, a point in the ubiquity, a beam of the intelligence, a vibration in the omnipotence, a single emotion in the boundless love of God. The experience,

FROM THE POLICE OFFICE.

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passion, and action of a few weeks in the drama of our appearance here may, when circumstances have been fortunately combined, prove as rich in joy and in use, as complete in itself and as fertile in its results, as twenty lives less happily ordained. Their result to humanity may be a Washington, an Oberlin, a Jenny Lind!

Should you even foresee the short duration of a charming tie in love, aim religiously to fulfill it in whatever manner the instincts it awakens decide, whether exclusively in spiritual love or in more integral consummation. The instincts of the organism are the faculties of the passions. Forbear to mutilate them on the one hand, as on the other you shall not permit them to invert the order of nature, or drown love in hot and hasty sensuality, nurtured by indolence, and stuffed with flesh and condiments.

Be chastely grateful for your present happiness in each other, as a pledge that your Father will, at another season and in due time, reveal to you other harmonies of love; nor seek to make of this tie, by constraint, what He has not intended it to be, lest in so doing you become the authors of each other's misery.

To love and to be loved, are the sweetest and most natural things in the world, and it is most wise in us to see, smell, taste, eat, enjoy, and appropriate to our life all the fair flowers or luscious fruits that nature sets before us in her bounty and kindliness.

No duty of life is more sacred than to cherish, cultivate, and develop, according to its own law or type, every passional affinity; they are not so plenty as blackberries in these starveling, swinish times.

But marriage! when it comes to putting the police badge on a passion! to handcuffing a sweet affinity of souls! to saying formally to those emotions, so delicate and sacred, whose evanescent yet ever-renewed charm, like the aroma of spiritual flowers, eludes even the grasp of self-consciousness, "Do you swear before Justice Bobtail to remain constant until death you two do part-(the very moment when true lovers