But this is not all. Nature, as beneficent to those who obey her precepts as she is merciless to those who disregard them, has added to this sentiment of love a physical pleasure in its gratification,--an honourable and proper pleasure, which none but the hypocrite or the ascetic will affect to condemn, none but the coarse or the lewd will regard as the object of love. There is, indeed, a passion which is the love of the body. We call it by its proper name of _lust_. There is another emotion, for which the rich tongue of the ancient Greeks had a word, to which we have nothing to correspond. Call it, if you will, Platonic love, and define it to be an exalted friendship. But understand that neither the one nor the other is _love_, in the true sense of the word, and that _both_ are inferior to it. Does the father, watching, with moistened eyes, his child at its mother's breast; does the husband, bending with solicitude over the sick-bed of his wife; does the wife, clinging to her husband through evil report and good report, through broken fortunes and failing health, indicate no loftier emotion than _lust_, no warmer sentiment than _friendship_? What ignorance, what perversity is so gross as not to perceive something here nobler than either? Do you say that such scenes are, alas, rare? We deny it. We see them daily in the streets; we meet them daily in our rounds. Admitted, by our calling, to the sacred precincts of many houses in the trying hours of sickness and death, we speak advisedly, and know that this is the prevailing meaning of love in domestic life. A warm, rich affection blesses the one who gives and the one who receives. Character developes under it as the plant beneath the sunlight. Happiness is an unknown word without it. Love and marriage are the only normal conditions of life. Without them, both man and woman for ever miss the best part of themselves. They suffer more, they sin more, they perish sooner. These are not hasty assertions. As a social law, let it be well understood that science pronounces that LOVE IS A NECESSITY. The single life is forced upon many of both sexes, in our present social condition. Many choose it from motives of economy, from timidity, or as a religious step, pleasing to God. The latter is a notion which probably arose from a belief that, somehow, celibacy, strictly observed, means chastity. It simply means continence. The chastest persons have been, and are, not the virgins and celibates, but the married. When this truth is known better, we shall have fewer sects and more religion.