enabling us to come into rapport with heavenly presences, association with whom transforms us into their own moral likeness. Companionship with poets makes us poetical; with musicians, musical; with objects of beauty, beautiful in character; with the good, divinely spiritual. Folded under the wing of immortal hope, embosomed on the heart of the Infinite, thrilled with the pulsations of angel faith, we thus ascend higher, higher in thought and purpose-the children of God gathered home in the heaven of Love.

CHAPTER XL.

FREEDOM AND FUNCTION OF LOVE.

"Love is the fulfilling of the law."

"Come angel! for I need thy love

More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain.
Come angel! like the mystic dove,

And let me in thy smiles rejoice and live again!"

"Love communes in gentle glances,

Feet responsive glide in dances,

Over there;

Orange-buds and pure white flowers,
Lattice the hymenial bowers,

Over there."

Jesus loved Martha, and her sister Mary, and Lazarus. Love is not merely a white lily undulating upon embosomed waters, not an æolean harp murmuring music in the window, not the cooing of the turtle doves, but an active principle, a divine soul-emotion, the central magnet of our conscious existence. Just in the ratio of the soul's unfoldment, love becomes subjective, philosophic, idealistic and universal. Platonic love, blending with the fraternal, and enzoned by the infinite, is exalting beyond all heights of mortal perception; and yet as well talk metaphysics to mummied gorillas, as such love, disenthralled of passion and earthliness, to those who swelter in the lower brain department of their cranial organisms.

The inimitable Emerson, determined to preserve his wholeness, and recognizing no one being as absolutely necessary to his happiness, says of those early selfish loves:

*

I know how delicious is this cup of love-I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child clinging to his toy, an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the picture alphabet through which our first lessons were prettily conveyed. * * * Once abroad, we pity those who can forego the magnificence of Nature's Eden for candle light and cards. * * This early dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our life-play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles, like light proceeding from an orb. It passes from loving one to loving all; and so, this one beautiful soul opens the divine door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. Thus in our first years are we put in training for a love which knows neither sex, person. nor parti ality; but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom."

Say not that Emerson's nature is cold and icy, reflecting only the crystalline side of life. To those sufficiently exalted rightly to translate him, he is warm, fresh, and golden. His soul feeds ours. Abiding in such love, we drink at his living fount of ideas, thrive upon his inspirational truths, bathe in his dreamy mysticisms, and feel the influx of eternal youth.

Souls require no introduction. The recognition is intuitional. Meeting a noble soul that knows our soul, we indulge the pleasing truth to us, that we knew the loved one in a pre-existent state, and delicious were those delicate experiences in the sweet realms of blessedness. Too etherial were the workings of that inner consciousness, then, to be now projected into the external memory of earth's sordid masses, cloyed with the cares of this material life.

"Tis somewhere told in Eastern story,

That those who loved once bloomed as flowers

On the same stem, amid the glory

Of Eden's green and fragrant bowers;

And that, though parted oft by fate,
Yet when the glow of life is ended,
Each soul again shall find its mate,
And in one bloom again be blended."

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