Part 8

"IDEALS OF LOVE."

"Greater love hath no man than that he shall give his life for another," whether the scene be set upon the mimic stage, or on the broad theatre of the world. Heroic rescues, desperate efforts to save endangered lives, care of the battle-wounded or fatally diseased meet, from great and small, brutal and cultivated, deserved recognition, even to the extent of making the individual actors--so favored by the gods--famous, throughout the world.

The patient service of men and women to their families, of children to their parents, or of friends who rejoice in serving, that goes on all around us conforms so entirely with our established ideals of what is right and becoming, that it is unnoticed and wins no applause, but oftener only calls out from the recipient demands for further sacrifice.

In all such related service the real blessing comes to those who give far more than to those who receive. The operation of this law hallows all the relationships of this life, and must finally yield to the unselfish giver undreamed of compensations. Not here, perhaps, but in that sphere of being where love is indeed the fulfilling of the law, shall the patient givers, those who have served at love's altars, find themselves closely allied to the immortal ones, "who do his pleasure."

Love, garlanded, and adorned with all that wealth can bestow, enthroned in seats of honor, and social recognition is accepted as our ideal of what love should claim, and win from life; but I have looked into the faces of humble, patient toilers, and there I have seen that the sustaining influence with them was love, and have marvelled greatly over the compelling power of their ideals of love.

Remembering that foundations of love upon this earthly planet were, of necessity, laid in the selfish instincts of the race--a race as yet so undeveloped in all that "makes for righteousness"--we need not despair of the final outcome, and realization of its high behest to the children of men; for no expression of love, however mean in view of our own exalted ideals, but is, in reality, an effort towards something higher and better. The obdurate and selfish are unfolded, and taught by its painful misunderstandings, and awful tragedies.

Those poor souls who expect everything from this life, whose ideals are bounded by their own selfishness, who have never discovered that God is Love, and that only through love, purified, exalted and idealized can any of his earthly children ever reach to any conscious relationship with our Father in Heaven, and who, failing to realize even their low ideals, pass on from one experience to another vainly searching for the realization of what their dimly perceived intuitions of love constantly assure them should be theirs--for even such as these there must be a final redemption; for, like one of old, they have "loved much," and the sins of a vast ignorance are at last condoned by God's all pervading, untiring, illimitable law of love.

O ye! who labor for humanity's uplifting; O weary workers in the homely ways of the unskilled in every relationship of life, unrecognized by your fellows be ye of good cheer! As the circling waves of a calm lake spread wider, and more widely from a center disturbed by some heavy substance, so shall your least word, or thought of pure, unselfish love, from your overburdened lives, reach out and diffuse an influence throughout the universe of God, and become a part of the life immortal!

Love, and love alone creates the desire for immortality, lifts up and renews the oft fainting faith, the faltering, changeful hope, and perpetuates the expectations of the restoration of beloved companions, the reunion of families, and friends. It inspires the spirit, and seals the brokenhearted to the service of "ideal love." It leads the human soul onward, and upward, until it triumphs, at last, over this life's defeats and losses, and its manifold despairs.

Undeterred by the alarms of war, the wails of the diseased and famine-cursed, and the violent protests of the oppressed, and misery-steeped unfortunates of this plane of being, the "Prince of Peace" is calling together his scattered forces. The beacon lights shine along the high places where dwell the exalted, and powerful ones of earth, and glimmer faintly from the lowlands, where the dire enemies of mankind--ignorance and superstition--are, at last, learning that God, the true God, loves, and cannot hate.

The "ground-swell" of the "ideal love" cannot be resisted, nor overborne by any competing power in the universe, and with ever-increasing force and power to conquer all of earth's conditions of unrest, and dissatisfaction, born of false ideals, it will sweep resistlessly on, until it is merged in God. The recognition of the homogeneity of the race, and the "Fatherhood of God," shall bring the longed for fulfillment of the ancient prophecy of "Peace on Earth, and good will to Man."

* * * * * *

The priests endowed the gods with vices which they knew to be popular among their rich and powerful patrons.

THE NEEDS OF WOMAN.

Women need any and all disciplines which teach them self-justice. There are many noble and good women who allow their whole lives to be picked away from them by demands upon their time and strength which come to them under the guise of duties. Viewed from a higher standpoint, they are not duties, in that they conflict with the great underlying principle of self-justice. This is the pivotal idea of a true religion; for it is impossible to be true, to be just to others save as we are so to ourselves, and while no character can be perfected, except through the fiery ordeal of an entire self-abnegation, there is a higher, and a holier life in store for those who have the strength, and the courage to plant their feet upon this God-given and eternal law of justice to self.

It is comparatively easy to gird one's self for the conflict which is apparent, nearly all women souls are equal to that heroism; but it is in the daily round of the household, in relation to the church, and to society, or to the professions where women need to watch most jealously the weakness of self-sacrifice. Women have had the beauty of "unselfishness," and "amiability" dinned into their ears for so long that there is no depth of degradation, or of abnegation of true womanhood to which they will not descend for the sake of being so considered by those whose interest it is to keep them where they virtually endorse the vices of others by their own lack of self-justice. While we must grope along until we understand the wickedness of this, and until we outgrow that weakness, let us be ready for, and equal to the hour which shall give us the laurels of the victor. And why not laurels? Has it not been uttered by the mouth of inspired prophecy that the "last shall be first," and that "the stone rejected by the builders shall yet be the head of the corner?" It rests with us, individually, to represent that truthfulness, and faithful adherence to the justice due to womanhood which shall yet crown her with rejoicing.

To this end women must begin to gather in those pearls of unselfish devotion and self-abnegation which they have been so recklessly casting under the feet of ignorance and beastliness.

It is blessed for lovely and loving woman to bestow bountifully from the richness of her nature. But every grace has its complement, and the complement of this, for the present, is the greater blessing of conserving herself until she knows her power as an individual, and thoroughly comprehends what is due to her dignity and worth.

MAN VERSUS WOMAN.

Man, living entirely in his physical nature, goes on and on in the gratification of the senses until he becomes satiated, and "blase," and there is nothing satisfactory left for him upon the sensuous plane. Then he either crystallizes into a hard, selfish being, or plunges still deeper into the slough of sensuality from which Divine Love alone can rescue him. This power is most often manifested by woman, the natural law-giver and redeemer. For ages man has projected his selfish human will into all the affairs of life, thus setting aside the higher law. In the love relations he has specially dominated woman, reversing the divine order of nature, and thus killing out all possible inspiration, and consequent happiness. Everywhere he has set up his own lustful desires as the rule and right of life in his relationship to woman, destroying the spiritual sacrament of marriage; and by his selfishness and greed of power, he has reduced her to a condition of prostitution. He outrages the helpless ones who have confided their honor, and their lives to his keeping, and the law--the vile, cursed, man-made law--upholds him in this slaughter of all that should make his heaven of trusting love. The wails of the wronged ones--specially those who suffer in the marriage relation--go up incessantly to God, and the woe of the children who, through these conditions, have inherited only animal love and instinct is enough to drown the "music of the spheres."

Parenthood being one phase of unfoldment, each individual must at some period of incarnation exercise this important function. To the uses of reproduction, the animal love with its blustering activities of expression, is, rightly understood, adjusted. But above and beyond this is the spiritual union which brings forth children of the mind, the fruitage of the soul, manifest in noble thoughts and brave deeds. Every expression of love, however crude and animal, is an impulsion of the flesh-enveloped soul toward the source of all love, and however distasteful one may seem, to such as have evolved a spiritual consciousness, and the demand for soul satisfaction, it cannot be ignored.

Through the pain of satiety, of disease, or suspended activity of the love nature, the ego at last senses its need of God. It comes to know that nothing less than divine love can ever satisfy this demand of the heart. The constant tendency of the inspired human being is to extremes. The "golden mean" is the "high water mark" of real cultivation. We have on one side the suppression of the ascetic, and at the other end of the line the abandonment of the debauchee--both sinful and false because extreme, both casting a reproach upon the laws of God as outworked in, and through nature. The ascetic, seeing the harmful results to the soul attending the usual unlimited, and undisciplined expression of nature which man accords to his supposed necessities, draws the line by cutting off all surplus of physical supplies and, stifling the cries of passion, retires into a cave or cell, and into himself, thus totally ignoring all the necessary activities attending the development of this planet and of the human race. He may thus reach a high altitude of purely spiritual perception; but it is, after all, a sublimated selfishness. His example is of no benefit to the world's workers. He is not of those who think and feel, and who are in the way of divulging esoteric knowledges to the quest of the vast army of earnest seekers after light upon these underlying laws of human life.

For the control by man of the love, and the life of woman there is a cut-and-dried sentiment and an enforced law concerning the segregated exercise of a natural function. By her acceptance, or rejection of this onesided "morale," is woman judged pure or impure, blessed or cursed, as the case may be. If this rule could be enforced equally upon both sexes, if there were not two distinct sets of moral laws, one for man, and quite another for woman, there would be no such injustice. As it is, there is but one way left open for woman. She must develop the power and will to be a law unto herself, regardless of the suspicion, and brutality of man, and with this also indifference to the foolness and the weak protest of her fellow slaves--women. These are "long, long thoughts." Ages must elapse ere the males of our kind will have evoluted up to a status where they will see that through justice to woman alone can they secure to themselves any degree of worthy, or lasting happiness, or satisfaction.

NATURAL CRUELTY OF THE UNDEVELOPED.

The most unaccountable phase of the minds of the leaders of religions has been their persistent effort to make their fellow beings wretched and miserable instead of glad and happy. We expect savagery from the Comanchee Indians and other primitive tribes and races; but from self-styled Christians the history of their cruelties is astounding. It is pure devil worship--that is what it is--if they but knew it.

One of the beautiful plans of theologians and priests for scaring half-witted people into their individual folds has been telling them that they were in danger of committing the most dreadful of all sins, the "sin against the Holy Ghost." The utterly "unpardonable sin" of all sins. This blasphemous, fiendish proposition has frightened numbers of half-baked folks, and they have pestered their small modicum of brains over this mysterious say-so of priests and parsons even to the point of committing suicide, or of landing themselves in lunatic asylums.

THE WORST SIN.

The much speculated over "sin against the Holy Ghost," the so-called "unpardonable sin" is the sin that men and women commit against themselves; for the most holy of all ghosts, or spirits, is that portion of God--the universal Spirit--embodied in their own separate personalities, and it is only "unpardonable" in that it sets the soul back from its possible and intended progress toward its ultimate perfection.