According to Genesis it was said to the woman, “In sorrow shalt thou bear children,” and it has always been a sore puzzle to Bible commentators what logical connection there may be between the eating of fruit and the pains of parturition. But when we understand the chaste references of the Bible to the act of generation, the connection is readily perceived. While the insensitive Negro or Indian mother may bear her child and shortly afterward resume her labors in the field, the western woman, more acutely sensitive and of high-strung nervous temperament, is year by year finding it more difficult to go through the ordeal of motherhood, though aided by the best and most skilled scientific help. The contributory reasons are various: In the first place, while we are exceedingly careful in selecting our horses and cattle for breeding, while we insist upon pedigree for the animals in order that we may bring out the very best strain of stock upon our farms, we exercise no such care with respect to the selection of a father or mother for our children. We mate upon impulse and regret it at our leisure, aided by laws which make it all too easy to enter or leave the sacred bonds of matrimony. The words pronounced by minister or judge are taken to be a license for unlimited indulgence, as if any man-made law could license the contravention of the law of God. While animals mate only at a certain time of the year and the mother is undisturbed during the period of pregnancy, this is not true of the human race. In view of these facts is it to be wondered at that we find such a dread of maternity, and is it not time that we seek to remedy the matter by a more sane relation between marriage partners? Astrology will reveal the temper and tendencies of each human being; it will enable two people to blend their characters in such a manner that a love life may be lived, and it will indicate the periods when interplanetary lines of force are most nearly conducive to painless parturition. Thus it will enable us to draw from the bosom of nature, children of love, capable of living long lives in good health. Finally the day will come when these bodies will have been made so perfect in their ethereal purity that they may last throughout the coming Age, and thus make marriage superfluous. But if we can love now when we see one another “through a glass darkly,” through the mask of personality and the veil of misunderstanding, we may be sure that the love of soul for soul, purged of passion in the furnace of sorrow, will be our brightest gem in heaven as its shadow is on earth. Chapter VII THE UNPARDONABLE SIN AND LOST SOULS Some of our students have been exercised about the unpardonable sin, and as this subject has a certain connection with the subject of marriage, one being a sacrilege and the other a sacrament, it might be well to elucidate the matter from a different point of view than has been formerly taken in our literature.