touched me even more deeply was that of a friend, the first one among my associates who believed with me in the possibility of a religious society without a dogmatic creed. The course of love in his case had not run smooth. The marriage between himself and the lovely young woman he wedded was the happy culmination of many trials, a haven of peace after storms. Hardly more than two years elapsed when he suddenly developed a fatal form of mental disease, and lingered for ten years in a long, slow, degrading decline. I thus became acquainted with frustration in one of its most woeful shapes. I remember how the poor young wife, during those ten years, widow in all but name, sought alleviation in various directions for her intolerable grief. Work to occupy her mind was one; caring for the needs of the poor another. I remember also how futile these devices seemed. She had lived “on the heights”; she must now descend to lower levels; she had had first best, she must now put up with second or third best. Gladly indeed would she have exchanged places with some of the poor women whom she assisted, could she have kept her husband at her side as they had theirs. It was well enough for her to try to alleviate the troubles of these people, but what were their sorrows compared to hers? And to keep the mind occupied by work, what was it at best but a temporary anodyne? When the work was over, in the still, lonely hours of the night, the storm of grief would break with all the greater violence. I had not taught these my friends a really valid spiritual conception of the purpose of marriage: I had failed in that: and when they were in need of it they did not have it to support them. They had looked on marriage as a scene of felicity; they had not been taught to make allowance for the frustration. I had not made preparation for the palpable frustrations just mentioned, nor yet for others, for the discovery that the beloved person is faulty, that the nimbus of divine personality does not coincide with the character. And especially did the lack of any explicit idea of personality prove fatal in those cases where the frustration is most serious, where real or apparent incompatibilities appear, or where actual degeneration occurs, and the hope of regeneration becomes remote.