Once given the essential idea, to be grasped by the intuitive faculty alone, the world is full of analogies, of natural revelations which help to support and illustrate great truths. Patmore was, however, caught and enthralled by one aspect of unity, by one great analogy, almost to the exclusion of all others. This is that in human love, but above all in wedded love, we have a symbol (that is an expression of a similar force in different material) of the love between God and the soul. What Patmore meant was that in the relationship and attitude of wedded lovers we hold the key to the mystery at the heart of life, and that we have in it a "real apprehension" (which is quite different from real comprehension[13]) of the relationship and attitude of humanity to God. His first wife's love revealed to him this, which is the basic fact of all his thought and work. The relationship of the soul to Christ _as His betrothed wife_ is the key to the feeling with which prayer and love and honour should be offered to Him ... _She_ showed me what that relationship involves of heavenly submission and spotless passionate loyalty.[14] He believed that sex is a relationship at the base of all things natural and divine; Nature, with endless being rife, Parts each thing into "him" and "her" And, in the arithmetic of life, The smallest unit is a pair.[15] This division into two and reconciliation into one, this clash of forces resulting in life, is, as Patmore points out in words curiously reminiscent of those of Boehme, at the root of all existence. All real apprehension of God, he says, is dependent upon the realisation of his triple Personality in one Being. Nature goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity in animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and material atom owing its being to the synthesis or "embrace" of the two opposed forces of expansion and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a single entity but in virtue of its being thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and in humanity and natural life this takes the form of sex, the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten sex spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and power, as the electric fire is the fulfilment and power of positive and negative in their "embrace." The essay from which this passage is taken, _The Bow set in the Cloud_, together with _The Precursor_, give in full detail an exposition of this belief of Patmore's, which was for him "_the burning heart of the Universe_." Female and male God made the man; His image is the whole, not half; And in our love we dimly scan The love which is between Himself.[16]