While Thomas Carlyle worships force-a king being to him the man that can and does-while John Stuart Mill continues to scatter incense upon the altar of original ideas, be it ours to do homage at the sacred shrine of love-a love pure, Platonian and universal. Such germinating from the soul's center, summering eternal in the brain's crystal dome, and looking tenderly towards the Infinite, incarnated in all humanity, is not passional, selfish, nor exacting. It does not demand attention, talks not of duty, lusts not after virtue, but trusts in principle-law-liberty-God!

Beautiful in effect is the medicine of love to the morally diseased. It works by an infinitude of methods, but always to redemptive ends. When fires, faggots, clanking chains, and gloomy penitentiaries had all failed to reform, "the still small voice" of love touched the heart-strings, opened a new fountain and redeemed the erring. This principle wielded by William Penn, tamed the Indian soul and toned it to throb in kindness. Wielded by the benignant Howard, it made dingy prisons, in Europe, schools of reform. Breathed by the great-hearted Oberlin, it transformed many by-corners of pollution, in the old world, into blooming gardens. Whispered by the womanly Elizabeth Fry, it filled those dungeoned in houses of refuge and asylums of outcasts with higher thoughts and purer ideals-as sure to produce high, elevating influences, as are shivering lightnings to do their missioned work. Moral power is the only force ever employed by God, or angels, in the divine order of subjugation. It is the deepest and mightiest principle in the universe-the silvery sea over which mortals sail to the heaven they seek. Oh, it is sweet-it is life evermore to breathe the beauty of love!

"For love is the theme that the seraph choirs

Are now hymning through the stars,

And we catch the strain from their golden lyres,

When our souls let down their bars."

Love bears no more relation to lust, than Christ to the Adam, than heaven to the hells. Lust is perversity, and is

no more love than light is darkness, or good is evil. How important clearly to comprehend the occult forces of life, to distinguish between use and abuse! The legitimate purpose of Combativeness is not pugilism, but a force-power acting in conjunction with benevolence and justice. So the primal purpose of Amativeness is not gratification, nor pleasurable intoxication, but "the replenishing of the earth." All more than this is wasted expenditure, and nature hurls terrible penalties at those who thus destroy their vital forces. The legitimacy of the generative plane, under the guidance of the wisdom principle, is admissible.

On the earthly planes of life, reproductions are earthly; in the spirit realms, spiritual; in the celestial, celestial. Angels generate thoughts, ideas, redemptive reforms. It is beautiful to become angelic on earth. There should be a mount of ascension, a spiritual birth to each brain organ, a heavenly polarity, before physical death. Said Jesus, "Ye must be born again!" Each faculty should be developed on the ascending line of divine use. Desire should be gratified only when pure, normal and subjected to the highest reason.

Through ante-natal perversions and individual excesses, humanity stands arraigned to-day, degenerate and incomplete. The remedy is not in multiplying the causes. God's laws are not to be trifled with. Perverted passions that blotch the face and cloud the moral nature, are not to be permitted to run their course, but to be curbed, controlled, directed and lifted to higher fields of action. Nothing could be more dangerous than railroad-riding, with the steam-forces neither managed nor guided by the engineer.

To let the "passions flow as rivers from lands to seas," is equivalent to saying-let the drunkard drink-drinking deeper draughts of liquid poison, will cure inebriation and usher in the millenium morn of temperance! Intensifying the darkness of a dark apartment, would be considered by a scientist a very singular method for producing light. True, the passions are not to be utterly eradicated; but to be subordinated to holy uses. They are not, as a loose, slipshod

optimism affirms, to have full sway, producing physical haggardness and spiritual imbecility. Checked, trained, educated, as nature-forces, by resurrectional processes, they are to rise through the strata of organic being to the arching brain faculties, clarified and purified to blend and act in harmony with the moral and reasoning brain-regions of man's spiritual nature. Mrs. Willard, in her "Sexology," makes this pointed statement:

"It is excessive sexual abuse that produces so much nervous debility in men and women. We have inherited it from our ancestors, and we transmit it to our children. * * * Houses of infamy and their pollutions are not the worst results of sexual abuses, because they are confined to them; they are diffused into families and transmitted to children. * * * Sexual commerce is just as bad as self-abuse, when carried to the same excess. In a certain sense it is worse."

In "Memoranda of Persons and Events," A. J. Davis testifies that—

"That misery-promoting abuse of the conjugal relation, called freepassionism, is an incident' to the development of mankind out of blood into spirit-out of materialism into spirituality-out of prostitution, into the divine order of society, when moral women will be but little lower than the angels. * * * There is but one true marriage; namely, the marriage of the right man with the right woman, forever."

The apocalyptic John saw, in vision, "an hundred and forty and four thousand," having his Father's name written in their foreheads. And he heard the voice of these harpers harping with their harps. They sung, as it were, a new song, and none could learn the song but the redeemed. * * * And the voice said "These are they which were not defiled with women. *** They enter through the gates into the city"-city of the "New Jerusalem "—the angelic dispensation that "cometh down from God out of heaven."

"Starving souls" cannot find supplies on the animal plane. Physical commerce cannot satisfy soul-wants. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." As the beautiful vine in the filthy cellar, pale and sickly, needs solar light; so the soul, satiated on the poisons of sensuality, is emaciated and dying

-dying for love-for heart-love-for divine love-the solar love of angels.

Hidden deep under soils and sloughs are the nuclei, the types and buds of unblown flowers, struggling to rise from their sedimental graves into the free, fresh light of heaven. So are there mortals who, from pre-natal conditions and debasing associations, live and seemingly luxuriate down in the lower, back-brain department of their being. Their condition is deplorable; their suffering must be intense-their struggles long and tearful. Far be it from us to condemn them. Jesus did not "condemn the woman caught in sin;" but he did say, "Go AND SIN NO MORE!" White-robed angels, standing upon the mountains of the pure and beautiful, are saying to those-to all-" Come up higher!"

All the germinal forces of the soul are divine; the wrong comes from their misdirections through material forms; the transgression from the ignorant or the wilful abuse of the good. Amativeness disrobed of earthliness, turned into higher channels, resurrected and actualized, as in angelic life, may not only originate, but may be considered the synonym of emotional love-a love pure, free and divine, working with and inspiring the moral excellence of the immortalized in heaven. This love, so spontaneous and holy, flowing out in gushing fountains of purity from regenerate souls to all humanity, should be cramped by no chains, crushed by no "law-corpse," appropriated by no selfish parasite, nor hedged about by the cage-wires and conventionalities of custom.

*

"One night I watched the shapeless clouds

That o'er my mind were rolling,
Till the clock's slow and measured tones
The hour of twelve were tolling."

Then o'er the loved disciples' page
Was I my vigil keeping:

I read and mused and read again,
While all the world was sleeping:

And as I mused, I felt a fire
Within me gently glowing;
Passion sunk low, as drooping gales
At hush of eve stop blowing.

The clouds that o'er my spirit hung
Gave sweet and gentle warning;
They changed to white and purpling flakes
As at the dawn of morning;

And then looked through the countenance,
Clothed in its sun-bright splendor,
The loved' who with the saints of old
Kept holy watch, and tender.

His robe was white as flakes of snow
When through the air descending;
I saw the clouds beneath him melt,

And rainbows o'er him bending ;-
And then a voice,-no, not a voice,-
A deep and calm revealing
Came to me like a vesper-strain
O'er tranquil waters stealing.

And ever since, that countenance
Is on my pathway shining;
A sun from out a higher sky

Whose light knows no declining.

All day it falls upon my road,

And keeps my feet from straying;
And when at night I lay me down
I fall asleep while praying."

The tendency of the spiritually minded is from grossness to refinement from promiscuity to chastity-from chastity to holiness from holiness to divinity. The higher the moral ambition, the more complete and victorious the virtue ! This Adamic battle ground cleared, the kingdom of God has come with its newness of life-"Not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit." The Apostle John declared that he had passed from death unto life; because he loved the brethren. This love can never degenerate into license, nor its liberty into anarchy; for it is a principle, disrobed of earthly passion-a holy resurrection.