The character of any man or woman who leads the single life is incomplete, lacking in fullness of sympathy for certain aspects of our common nature, not perfectly rounded to the orb of man’s whole life. All examples, even the highest, give evidence of this. No man who has not had a wife whom he loved can understand what love is; he who is not a parent, can never appreciate the feelings of a father. The fruition of life, even on the lowest terms, is impossible without the union of the sexes. The first Napoleon, in one of his letters, describing the essential needs of man, numbered them as three,――food, shelter, woman. All doctrines and social theories which conflict with this primordial law of the life of the species are unnatural, and their tendency is lowering to the progress of the race. Maternity, not virginity, is the holier state. Celibate orders have proved as sterile in intellectual as in physical offspring. Love, marriage, children, the family,――the emotions and feelings, the affections and the ideas, which centre around these foci of human activity are essential elements in every life which is lived to the full measure of its powers. Nothing can take their places. Happiness without them is not human. The emotion of Love belongs to those whose aims are ideal, because it is concerned with the future evolution of the species. In the iridescent glow of this master-passion its object never seems a mere human being, a man or a woman, but is invested with a charm unseen by the eye, not expressed in form or color, endowed with the power of exciting the soul to an indefinite and passionate expansion. It is the inaudible appeal of unborn posterity for its share in the world of Being. Hence it is that Love is so powerfully excited by Beauty, by the symmetry and traits which foreshadow the final physical perfection of the race, the unconscious but unceasing struggle of organic nature toward nobler transformations, toward the building of a tabernacle fit to be a shrine for the activities of a higher life. Though hundreds of volumes have been written in poetry and prose on the subject of Love, it remains unexhausted, because it is inexhaustible. Its seed-field is the boundless future, its message concerns all posterity. There is something in it deeper than the emotion of any single heart, farther reaching than any individual effort. There is a secret about it which can never be wholly told, which it were a profanation to try to express. Even between loving ones, it is better not to talk much of it, nor too curiously to think about it. When true and pure, it will be manifested without words in ennobling the character and elevating its aims and actions.