I have read your letter with deep interest. Your inquiries respecting the mission of the sexes, and the government of your passional relations with your wife, seem right and proper, and what every man, who would secure and perpetuate the love and respect of his wife, and the purity and happiness of his home, will make, and on which, above all other subjects, he will seek for light. They shall receive frank and candid answers, so far as I can give them. I thank you for proposing them, as, in answering, I shall take occasion to give my views on a subject which, of all others, most directly concerns the organization and development, the character and destiny of the men and women of the future, and which involves the purity and peace of home, and the growth and prosperity of society. Here let me say, that on no subject should a man and woman, as they are being attracted into conjugal relations, be more open and truthful with each other than on this. No woman, who would save herself and the man she loves from a desecrated and wretched home, should enter into the physical relations of marriage with a man until she understands what he expects of her as to the function of maternity, and the relation that leads to it. If a woman is made aware that the man who would win her as a wife regards her and the marriage relation only as the means of a legalized gratification of his passions, and she sees fit to live with him as a wife, with such a prospect before her, she must take the consequences of a course so degrading and so shameless. If she sees fit to make an offering of her body and soul on the altar of her husband’s sensuality, she must do it; but she has a right to know to what base uses her womanhood is to be put; and it is due to her, as well as to himself, that he should tell her beforehand precisely what he wants and expects of her. Too frequently man shrinks from all allusion, during courtship, to his expectations in regard to future passional relations. He fears to speak of them, lest he should shock and repel the woman he would win as a wife. Being conscious, it may be, of an intention to use the power he may acquire over her person for his own gratification, he shuns all interchange of views with her, lest she should divine the hidden sensualism of his soul, and his intention to victimize her person to it, the moment he shall get the license. A woman had better die at once than enter into or continue in marriage with a man whose highest conception of the relation is, that it is a means of licensed animal indulgence. In such a relation, body and soul are sacrificed. “Let there be light” as to what constitutes a natural, divine parentage!