Love is so closely connected with our lives, and all that makes or mars
our peace and pleasure, health and beauty, that I should feel guilty of a
sin of omission by excluding this item from my chapter on health and
happiness.
To be unloved is to be unhappy. Do not forget the connection between
health and happiness. They are all but synonymous terms.
You may know the unloved and unlovely by the lines of care, dissipation,
or crime that are furrowed upon their brows. Go into the highways, and you
may readily pick out the unloved child by its unsatisfied expression of
countenance. It lifts its great, hungry eyes to yours instinctively, and
asks for love and sympathy as plainly by that searching look, as the child
of penury, the bread-starveling asks for alms when it presents its scrawny
hand, and in pitiful tones says, "Please give me a penny, for God's sake."
O, give the child "love," for God's sake; for he so loved the world that
he gave us his only begotten Son, who only in turn taught us to love.
Physical perfection is never found in the unloved.
The unloved wife is not long beautiful, nor the child of such. There is a
marked difference between them and the wife and child that the husband and
father cherishes and caresses with unrestrained affection. In sickness
love divides the burden, as in the common toils of life.
Disguise or deny the truth of the assertion if you will, woman must love
somebody or some thing. She were not otherwise a true woman, nor made in
the image of her Maker. If the husband denies her that affection which
truly belongs to her nature, he must not blame her, but himself, if she
loves another. She will cling to something. If she has no children upon
whom to lavish her affections, she will love some other's, or a pet
canary, or even a cat, or lapdog; but love she will.