But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if we realize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn by experience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we begin to glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom and sufficient Love, we graduate into the classification of God-hood, immortality; and that immortality means union with our mate; sex-union, in all that constitutes its highest and most satisfying aspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love and bliss, there is an incentive to aspire. Love is the only way that immortality can be attained. It cannot be "taken," like degrees of secret societies. It cannot be purloined, or feigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishment has never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of the doctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner has known better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that has dwarfed our stature. In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wise patience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods." Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good and earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd back at its summons to inhabit their perfected world." We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautiful words--elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is always in the future; but if it be always in the future it will never be ours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. These prophetic utterances are literal truths. Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as we will be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise--the body. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interior nature.