Young people must therefore learn to reverence their future duties.
These they altogether miss, if they squander their spiritual and bodily
obligations, in unions formed and dissolved thoughtlessly, without any
intention of fidelity, without the worth of responsibility. But they
must also know that it is a still greater transgression of their duty if
the life of a child is called forth with cold hearts and cold temper,
whether this happens in a marriage based on worldly motives or one
maintained on moral grounds in which the previously existing discord is
transmitted to a new being.
Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive, by the consciousness of
numerous breaches of faith, towards their youthful dreams, their ideal
convictions, are often precisely those, who in their children, struggle
against the pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong feelings, its
higher aims. They often teach that love as a rule ends after marriage,
that marriages can be made without love. This is a process of thought
resembling the conclusion that a vessel can quite well go into the sea
with some defect, since it is possible in any event that it will be
damaged. They speak of the impurity of the senses, of the advantages of
a marriage based on friendship and reason, of the calming power of duty.
All of these are chilly processes of reason by which souls, filled with
the warmth of life, are killed. Daughters must be helped by their
mothers, wisely and delicately, in order to be protected from hasty
acts, in order to distinguish with open eyes, when their feelings
themselves are uncertain. It must be branded upon their souls and their
nerves that they will be fallen beings if they give themselves from
other reasons than from reciprocated love. Under these convictions
alone, will there be a great transformation of present ethical
standards. Men think that they can do with marriage what they will; that
they can enter upon it with any kind of motive; they think that they
must marry from feelings of duty, to fulfil some given engagement, or to
atone for some fault; that they have the right to enter upon a marriage
without love because they long for home life. While these things are
regarded as legitimate, men stand on the same ethical level as the
person who commits murder because he has first stolen, or has stolen
because he was hungry. The great crime against the holiness of
generation is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the most
sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where innumerable secret influences
order the destiny of a new generation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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