Please do not mistake me. I do not believe that marriage is the only circumstance through which the sexes can become self-poised, completed and stable. I do not believe that those who marry should always accept the limited service that little children demand of them. I do not believe that the sacrifices of fatherhood and motherhood are the highest sacrifices. Nothing of the kind. Marriage is simply a means by which the less advanced souls, the feeble, the selfish, may rise out of feebleness into strength, out of self into God. Susan E. Blow, in her "Study of Dante," has defined the Inferno as the soul filled with self, the Purgatorio as the soul emptied of self, and the Paradiso as the soul filled with God. Dante himself, with his divine insight into the nature of sin, places the jealous souls (become so through selfishness extreme) in icebound Cocytus, at the very pit of the Inferno. To most of us marriage is indeed the gateway leading out of an Inferno of selfishness, and it is marriage that places upon our backs the precious burdens which we must carry up the Purgatorio mountain. "The more we climb the less it hurts until we seem to fly."[3] But climb we must until the burdens have all fallen and the self has disappeared. By the light of "the dim star that burns within" the cyclic path must be ascended. But when the top has been reached "its light will suddenly become the infinite light." We shall have entered the Paradiso. Advanced souls, those who are capable of wider and better service, need not to complete themselves in marriage nor to find their expression in the opportunities it gives them. They are strong enough to find it voluntarily in a cause. They do not marry on the physical plane, but truly wedded are they on the spiritual plane and in that marriage to the needs of the world they find the other half, their expression. They cease their hovering between opposites and are stable. Such souls were Michael Angelo and Raphael, who found complete expression in art. Socrates needed no wife. He found his expression in loafing on the street-corners and plying his mystic questions. Xantippe was clearly a superfluity and we do not blame her for scolding him when we remember that she had none of his philosophic insight to carry her over the desert of his neglect. Dorothea Dix, Florence Nightingale and hundreds of other souls have found their appropriate expression in ministry to physical suffering. H. P. B., great loving heart, forgot self in a sublime service of the mind and of the spirit. Such souls do not drift nor waver; they need none of the experiences of physical fatherhood or motherhood; they are wedded to the needs of the world, they become spiritual fathers and mothers to its children, they find their expression in brotherhood, they are self-poised, completed, and at rest. [2] Voice of the Silence. [3] Dante.