Man appears to have been superendowed with amativeness since first he stood erect. Inferior intellect and strong passions characterized the primitive man. And as the head of the modern man still awaits the arch, he continues to be intemperate on this side of his nature, and to dominate woman in such degree as suits his pleasure. Over-indulgence is followed by a sense of shame, of disgust; and as this habit of excess was and is universal, man has learned to separate this passion from what he calls his higher nature, and brand it as degrading, sensual, shameful. The helpless, the willing subjection of woman in marriage has served to lower yet more the character of the relation. The Church has taught that marriage is a sensual estate, including one major-general and one private. A profound contempt for nature is inherited with the blood, and is confirmed in us by experience. Now, science and philosophy prove that sin, evil, wickedness, mean merely a want of balance among faculties in themselves good. How weak is a man without sufficient firmness, yet how unamenable is he who possesses too large a share. How valuable is acquisitiveness with conscience and the reasoning powers fully developed. Without the latter, acquisitiveness purloins cash and jewelry. Excess of amativeness--the faculty most blindly abused hitherto--has worked most cruel wrong. Goaded by stimulants it has murdered its willing slave, sought satisfaction in promiscuous relations which destroy conjugal love, changing it to lust,--levied tax on the other organs of the brain, dragging them with itself to a shameful death. The difference between Love and Lust is the difference between heaven and hell. Love seeks only the happiness of the being loved, and is as refined in its most private as in its public demeanor. Lust cares only for selfish, animal gratification, without regard to the slave who gives enforced consent. That an act absolutely necessary to the continuance of the race, animal, human, and vegetable, and the principle of which governs even the mineral world, should be in itself, and under right conditions, considered coarse, is but evidence of our own ignorance. We reason _a priori_ that when the entire being consents, the spiritual as well as the affectional, the act of union is as pure in its character as the blossoming of the lily or the rose. The pure, unselfish love of a noble man, when carried to its ultimate with a happily responsive wife, should be as free from shame as the opening violet. Emotion is as divine as thought. _Could_ it be necessary, or even possible, for a merely sensual act to originate a being like Margaret Fuller, or Hawthorne, or the author of Shakespeare’s plays? He who replies in the affirmative is unbalanced and unnatural. To common observation the more reverent and kindly demeanor of the lad as he approaches puberty demonstrates the refining, ameliorating nature of conjugal love.