LOVE IS THE ELECTRIC LAW OF LIFE: ALL THAT LIVE MUST COME FROM LOVING
God is love, and love is the law of life and the creative force of the
universe. The love of God in the soul is the substance and life of all
religion. The love of fellow-man in the heart is the foundation of all
human kindness and social ethics. As Dante followed his beloved Beatrice
from world to world until he found her at the gates of Paradise, so we
must follow our loves and ideals through all the tragic incidents of
existence until we find them as guardian angels at the gates of
celestial glory and creative perfection.
A noble character, a worthy and useful life of service to others is the
chief purpose and crowning glory of all earthly existence. Wealth and
fame are mere incidents in the fleeting drama of human experience.
All true greatness is in the beauty and grandeur of the soul. It must
come from within; external manifestations may shadow it forth, but
cannot produce it.
All true gentleness and kindness are a reflex of the inner life of love
and willing service. We live in the atmosphere that our thoughts and
spirits breathe around us, and by opening the windows and doors of our
soul to love we inhale the perfume from other souls, and the breath of
life from Deity Himself.
Thoughts are forces, and through them we have creative power; but they
must be winged with love to manifest divine energy. Every act is
preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the
habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the
life and destiny.
Everything in the material universe has its origin first in the
spiritual concept or thought, and from this it takes its form. The
spoken word and the mighty deed spring from the potency of living
thought, and life is a tireless swimmer in an ocean of thought. Thought
is the conscious energy of the soul, the subtle, invisible force of the
reasoning, resistless mind, and, to be potent with life, must be winged
with love. Thought is everywhere and surrounds us like the atmosphere we
breathe. When we want a thought we should reach up into the air for it
with the caressing hand of love, and it will come like an invisible
messenger from spirit land. We should seek thought and wisdom in the
intellectual zenith of our own minds, and not from mediums or
clairvoyants, for they have never revealed any great truths.
Thus our great poets, sages and prophets have reached up into the
spiritual altitudes and gathered wisdom and truth as the stars are
gathered and sparkle in the glittering mirror of night's far off and
measureless spaces. They come with the speed of light from all suns and
spheres in the jewelled crown of God's eternal expanse of love and life,
they whisper wonderful things to the listening spirit in the silent
chambers of the dreaming soul, and they come like angel faces in the
visions of night and paint with the flaming finger of anticipated joy
the glorious beatitudes of immortality and love. There is the science of
thought which brings wisdom and success, and the science of love that
brings peace and joy. It is a beautiful thing to live. Life is the fine
art of the soul, the literature of the spirit, where it writes its hopes
and achievements.
It is the theatre of all possibilities here and hereafter, but its
atmosphere must be magnetic with love and faith where the spiritual
forces may battle and exert their powers. We must first love all the
world if we would have the world love us. Only what comes from the heart
can reach the heart of the world, for mankind will care little for us
unless we show we care for mankind. But what man earnestly desires and
persistently wills and strives to accomplish through love will finally
be attained. Love and goodness are all-powerful and will eventually
conquer.
The first cause of all discontent, weariness, bitterness and vanity of
life is selfishness. It is the corrosive element that rusts away all the
pure gold of energy and aspiration. It is as amazing as sad that we
burden ourselves with selfish strivings that are of no consequence, and
miss the gladness and exhilaration of living. For no life is successful
unless it is radiant with love and usefulness. Emerson says: "Life is an
ecstasy and nothing else is really worth living. Happiness is not
determined by a bank account or the flattering incense of praise, but is
a mental and spiritual condition."
Ye who seek liberty know this; it can only be found in the liberty of
your fellow men. Ye who seek happiness know this; ye can only find it
in the happiness of others, and if you desire to be happy you must make
others happy. This is God's eternal law of compensation--of
altruism--love to others; what you do unto others you do unto yourself.
Look upon thy fellow man with wisdom and thou shalt have love. Feel for
thy fellow man with love and thou shalt have wisdom, and, having wisdom
and love, thou hast God and heaven in thy heart. These are the golden
rules of the New Testament, written in the reason, conscience and
experience of men, as God's living book of wisdom and truth.
Every action has its rebound or echo. Others will return your love or
hate as the mountains return an echo, and by the same law. "Whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap." The hate you send forth will
return to you, the love you gave will come back to you, for it is an
immortal part of you and a part of Omnipotent Deity.
If you are sick, love! If you are envied, hated and slandered, love! If
age and death steal upon you, love! For God is love, and heaven is love,
and love is life eternal. This is God's law, this is the law of man's
nature, the law of the New Testament, the law of love and life, the law
of the universe.
Whatever may be man's misfortune, if he has a love of humanity, a love
of literature, art or nature, he has resources of happiness that nothing
can remove. With these the poor man is rich, and the rich man can never
be poor. For each by love has overcome the world. Therefore believe and
love, and hold fast to the conviction that the forces of life are divine
and eternal, and their laws written in the reason and consciences of
men, and that death is only a transition from our world to another of
greater beauty and perfection. The inadequacy of earth-life to satisfy
the soul's capabilities is evidence that its career must continue
hereafter in brighter worlds of celestial love and destiny.
It is said the common epitaph of humanity is, "They mean well, try a
little and fail much." But if love is their guiding star and they obey
the dictates of their reason and conscious duty, their lives cannot be
failures. Most of our troubles and cares, like echoes, do not exist
until we call them forth. But sweet, subdued sorrow, and the tears of
love and sympathy that spring from the generous heart to the soulful
eyes, are like heavenly dews, and promote the growth of the soul. They
should not be classed among the depressing trials. Neither should
friendly rivalry, or laudable ambition to excel, be deemed trying
aggressions, for they are beneficial phases of growth. Humanity should
emancipate itself by hitching its chariot to the star of love, and
switching the current of human energy from the circuit of worry and
anger, and connecting it with the motors of good thoughts and noble
deeds.
All men should realize the fact that anger turns the natural juices of
the body into poison as the vibrations of thunder sour the sweetest
milk. And every fit of anger is an electric trip-hammer that drives a
nail into the coffin of life and shortens human existence. All nature
reveals the law of "natural selection and survival of the fittest," and
demands in man the highest perfection of love, beauty and
self-development.
The culture of the divine essence of the soul, love and ideality will
eventually emancipate, exalt and ennoble human life.
Love is the beginning of life. Love is the creative agency of all human
and animal existence. Even the vegetable world, trees, shrubs and
flowers have their dual, sexual amities, and their male and female
blending in the love of unity and the unity of love, and thereby
propagate and continue their species in the ever changing cycles of
life.
All that live must come from loving. The positive and negative circles
of electric and spiritual forces in man and woman must be broken and
reunited in a combined circle of dual vitalizing growth and power before
God's first command, "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth,"
can be consummated.
God has so organized the universe that love brings life and continues
it, while hatred checks all the sweet gushing juices and joys of hope
and life, and, brings death and darkness. Love commands the electric
creative forces of human life as God commands them in the boundless
heavens. Love is the elemental part of God, and the godly part of man.
And he whose soul is diffused with love is enwrapt in the effulgent
drapery of Divine goodness and joy.
Woman by Divine right and the Supreme decrees of destiny is the
ministering angel of love and life, and is next to God the Creator and
Preserver of the human race.
All that live must come from loving
In the hallowed name of wife,
God has set the bounds of being
And the joy of giving life.
Some very strong writers believe man's body is the product of the
thought and mental force of his progenitors. If so, the mental impulse
of love, and even its lower form of animal passion, is the begetter of
the human race. Mrs. Josephine Barton, in "Mothers of the Living,"
declares, "The history of flesh has its beginning in the male atom, and
exists as an unembodied idea in mental solution. Thinking results in
ideas and ideas crystallize into form. Thoughts are the blocks out of
which children are made. The physical gets its breath of life from the
mental or spiritual. The first avenue of development after its
appearance in form in the male parent is the daily and hourly thinking,
exercised in the mentality of the parent. These atoms, though
microscopic, are the brain and spinal cord of the atom man. The product
of the male element is judgment and will, of the female love and
intuition; so the atom man crystallizes only the seat, brain and nerve
faculties. This structure--temple of the soul--like the acorn, has
inherent within it growth and fruit possibilities."
She arouses useful thought and adds with force and eloquence, "All men
are, by their daily thinking, moulding the brain and spinal cords of
future men.
"O men of earth! what qualities are you weaving in your thread of
thought? Of what substance are you moulding the grand army of the future
race? Are you endowing them with the intellect of true manhood, or
crystallizing into atoms all manner of distorted brains?
"Our bodies are bulletins of our thoughts, and the male atom is the
microscopic beginning of childlife, and when expelled from the loins of
their progenitors, become the 'living souls' that people the cities and
the plains. The human atom thus formed, when imparted into the custody
of the mother, is ready for the breath of life which the mother mind, by
love and intuition will breathe into it. The temple for a human soul is
thus constructed. The nourishment then given is as pliant to thought as
the ocean to a raindrop, and prenatal education is most important. O
splendid fact! Be lifted up, thou expectant mother of the living! You
are at liberty to take the helm of possibility and steer for the sunlit
isles where all sons are gods. The mother should be herself what she
would have her child be. She should affirm and reiterate. 'I am the heir
of all wisdom, the expression of all beauty, the revelation of love and
truth, the life proclamation of the Eternal. I am serene, radiant,
valiant, loving, aspiring, knowing.' Then will all conceptions be
immaculate and all human life glorious and divine."
I maintain that woman is the prototype of the godmother of the universe,
who is the third person of the Trinity, known as the Holy Ghost or
Comforter. The Trinity of the theologians--_three persons in one_--is
contrary to all human reason and logic. It contradicts every type of
being in universal creation, and would be a monstrosity in natural law
and creative experience. It defies all analysis and subverts all law of
animate and inanimate nature. God never thus contradicts himself, his
own laws, and his created universe, or the book of nature and man's
reason; and no such doctrine is taught in the New Testament, when
analyzed by a true construction of language.
To deny the Trinity was a crime punished by death a century or two ago
in England; and ecclesiastical authority there and elsewhere prescribed
what man should believe for centuries, or receive the punishment
prescribed by law or the Inquisition. Until recent times men were not
allowed to think for themselves.
But reason and truth, written in the soul of man by the finger of Deity,
will assert its divine right to correct the blunders of ignorance and
superstition.
And as it was many ages before the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man was discovered and recognized, so it required modern intelligence
and reason to place woman in her true and God-given position; and
recognize in God the Father, God the Son and God the Mother, the same
natural trinity in heaven as exists on earth in father, mother and
child. The book of nature, and the book of man's reason asserts there
can be no father or son without a mother. They would be an anomaly in
nature, unthinkable and impossible, and if there is a Father and Son in
heaven, there is a Divine Mother, who has always been there as the
companion and counselor of Deity, and is also the Divine Comforter of
all human souls. And if there is sex in all nature, it is reasonable to
believe there is sex in the family of Deity. When Christ said, "I and my
Father are one," he meant one in purpose and spirit.
Up to the recent centuries, woman was the chattel slave of man, kept in
ignorance and degradation, and deemed inferior to man, and the past ages
would not recognize her divinity, or her equality with man. But now she
stands on a level with man, heart to heart, and brain to brain, and
every true man offers her the tribute of love and reverence, and
recognizes that in all the realms of earth and stars there is no being
so worthy of love and worship, next to Deity, as the _mothers of men_.
They are the saviors of mankind, whose vicarious suffering has brought
forth and redeemed the generations of men. They are the trees of life in
God's earthly garden, whose branches, ladened with the fruits of love,
have called forth the mysterious blossoms of being to bloom in the
fields of time and people the land of immortal spirits.
The beginning of civilization was when the mother bid the rude men of
the forest and hill to build the needed shelter in grove or cave to
protect her and her helpless offspring. And from that simple shelter or
thatched-roofed hut has sprung the vine-clad cottage, and the marble
palace, and the family roof-tree of every house in every land. It was
the mothers of men who filled up the broken ranks of war, and brought
peace, and wove garments, and refined and civilized man and taught him
the arts and commerce of civilized life. And could the mothers control
the destinies of nations, their loving hearts would banish war, and
peace would be universal.
And the most precious heritage of every nation on the green earth is the
nobility of its mothers, for without noble mothers, it can have no
worthy and manly men.
All nations should recognize this fact, and instead of giving pensions
to those who destroy life, they should give them to those who multiply
and replenish it, and make a nation worthy of existence and fame. And
God will surely bestow on the mothers of men a crown of eternal glory
for every life added to his empire and domain of deathless eternities.
The momentous question arises in this busy age of travel and pleasure,
when so many seek the luxurious ease of opulence and avoid as far as
possible all cares and responsibility, Will the emancipated womanhood of
our land deny the law of love and life, written in the heart and
conscience of all sentient beings, and decline the angelic ministrations
of maternity? Will they refuse to join in the economy of God and nature,
or leave this high and holy vocation to the ignorant and superstitious
of our foreign element? If so, the citizenship of our beloved nation
will degenerate with each succeeding generation.
Will the modern woman seek social pleasures and the flattery of passing
admiration in lieu of home life and maternity, and be satisfied to
flutter as a gaudy butterfly of fashion? Will her womanly heart find the
prattle of a baby voice and the pressure of its chubby hands upon her
smiling face, as it crows in her loving arms, a truer, sweeter pleasure
than the social triumphs of a few fleeting seasons? A joyous child
brings more pleasure to a household than a marble palace with mahogany
furniture and an automobile.
This is the all-important _woman question of the future_--the question
of race suicide. For the entrance of woman into all the vocations of
business life, the tendency to avoid domestic cares, the laxity of the
marriage vows, together with the elimination of homes for boarding
houses, and the prevalence of divorces, makes it a serious question for
the future. Already this pressing vital question causes the wisest men
of France to tremble for the future of their race and nation, for its
shrinking population is forcing it from the rank of a first-class power
to the humiliation of weakness and decay. Will they listen to France's
Macedonian call and the law of love and life written in their womanly
natures?
Humanity of the past and present is not final. It shall not cease at the
present development. Human society was never static. We are at the
beginning of the greatest changes in human history. There will be no
shock, but the transforming, silent touch of universal evolution, whose
voice speaks thus: "We are the creatures of twilight, but out of our
minds and the lineage of our minds will spring minds that will reach
forward fearlessly. A day will come--one day in the unending succession
of days--when the beings now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our
loins, shall stand on this earth as on a footstool, and they shall laugh
and reach out their hands among the stars."
It is said that the flower which opens and smiles upon the brink of an
abyss is like love, which lives also between two eternities. It is the
most human of the passions and at the same time the most divine. It is
the most intimate and the most ethereal; it guides the poet when he
scales the skies and lifts the soul to celestial raptures.
The gifted and the common mind are alike troubled, agitated and exalted
by this divinity who evokes their silent passions and stirs their
slumbering fancy.
Many animals change their form and color in the season of love, and man
is similarly affected in his psychic nature. Every human and divine
element responds to the witchery of the god of love. And new colors in
thought and character appear, and the glowing eye glistens with changing
smile or tear, like dewdrops on the jewelled face of morn. The first
touch of poetry lights up the prosy brain, the first ambitions,
brilliant hopes, struggles, flashes of genius, and heroic resolves
spring forth like living phantoms at the magic power of this matchless
magician of the soul.
Woman, far more than man, is reared in the regions of love, and has more
leisure to reflect on the secret movements of her heart, and to gather
the wisdom and beauty of love and distill it as the rarest perfume of
life. Love is woman's crown of divinity. Love lifts man to his highest
capabilities, noblest enterprises and loftiest ideals, and makes him
monarch of a larger and more beautiful world.
The history of man shows how gross and abject natures are transformed by
love. How dull and stolid minds have been guided by it to paths of honor
and glory. It is said that fame and science should guard themselves from
love as from a dangerous enemy, and that to be a great man one must love
their art alone and be wed only to their great ambitions.
Ah! but for one genius killed by love, a hundred owe to it all their
greatness and inspiration and the moving force of life, and bless it as
superior to fame and sweeter than all the laurels of victory or the
plaudits of success.
All the glory of art and science, of thrones and crowns, is inspired by
the love of woman. This was openly proclaimed in the heroic and
chivalrous ages and should still be held in grateful remembrance.
If love does not always elevate and refine and work the miracles of its
magic, it is because men lower their ideals of women and love. Woman has
a stronger thirst after the ideal, a more refined sensibility, exquisite
fancy and poetic nature and aids man to mount to loftier actions and
ideals. In a beautiful picture, Dante is below, Beatrice above; he looks
at her and is thus inspired, while her eyes, fixed upon him, seem to
say: "Upward, upward; it is thither we must go together!" It is said
nothing is so irresistible as the enthusiasm of woman. Without reason
for believing, without strength for hope, sustained solely by love, she
is always full of faith for the great and beautiful things, and with
sublime imprudence cries, "Forward, forward!" and drags man to the most
difficult summits of success.
A wise man says: "In the great and little things, after having consulted
science and art, experience and imagination, after having read history
and human hearts, also always consult the woman you love, whether it be
a question of a book or a law, or a work of art, or of business,
industry or poetry. She will certainly have something new to tell you."
Ambition often fails to elevate men, they die without having attained
their full measure of power. Only the love of woman could have given
them the energy which ambition and self-love were powerless to bestow.
In the past ages the world prated much about aristocracy. There have
been four kinds of aristocracy in the world's history. There has been
the aristocracy of muscle--the supremacy of brute force. This was
followed by the aristocracy of blood or family pedigree, by which one
claimed by inheritance superiority over others. Then came the
aristocracy of wealth, which prevails in our day, whereby those who
obtain fortunes by birth, accident, parsimony, force or fraud, claim
superiority over others less sordid or less fortunate. But the true and
only aristocracy that ever has or ever will exist in the human race is
the _aristocracy of love and goodness_. There is nothing so kingly as
kindness, nothing so royal as truth, and nothing so godlike as love.
The aristocracy of muscle has brought misery and distress and cursed the
world with cruelty and oppression; the aristocracies of blood and wealth
have often brought sorrow to their possessors, and proved a rope of
sand, a broken reed, a Jonas' gourd that faded in a night. But the
aristocracy of love and goodness is God's aristocracy, and belongs to
the society of heaven. It is a part of the family of Deity, and
possesses the wealth of the universe. It is the pride of celestial
hosts, and the joy and blessing of transient mortality. The humblest of
earth may join this aristocracy of love and goodness and be a prince and
king in his own right, by royal prerogative as eternal and enduring as
the earth and stars.
Thus we find that love is the spiritual and electric law of life, and
the crown-jewel of the universe; that it gives life and inspires it;
that all the creations and forces of nature are dual and sexual, with
love as the supreme sovereign of all life and destiny.
Magnificent are the pyramids of Cheops, but while they and the groves of
gods and pillars at Karnac were being reared for a tyrannous nobility
and priesthood, twenty thousand common men agonized and died in the
quarries. Beautiful was Athens, "The City of the Violet Crown," when the
sunlight flashed from the Parthenon; but Aristides was banished because
he was just, and Socrates was murdered because he taught the oneness of
God. Rome sat on her seven hills and ruled the world; but men were
butchered in the arena to make a Roman holiday, and at night Christians
were burned for torches to light up Nero's golden house. All this was
because love had not exalted the ideals and energized the wills of men.
In the middle ages the sound of the chisels carving the marble dreams of
Michael Angelo was drowned by the shrieks of victims of the Inquisition;
and later in England, villains and serfs, even after Magna Charta, were
hanged for stealing five shillings. In our own land Cotton Mather tells
us men were crushed by heavy stones upon their breast, as punishment for
petty offenses, and witches swung in the breezes of Salem; and less than
fifty years ago human slavery was sanctioned by law. All these horrors
and the cruelty of the world have been because men have not let love
illumine the soul and energize the heart of humanity. To-day all this is
changed. The ægis of the law protects the humblest citizen, and the fate
of nations is decided not by a Hannibal or a Charlemagne, but in
legislative halls and courts of justice. And all men may work and hope,
for fame is waiting with willing laurels for souls aglow with the fires
of love and genius, who are destined to be torch bearers along the
highways of heavenly harmonies.
The heaven of all the heavens above,
The god of all the gods is Love.
Carlisle, that rugged old thinker, declared that man should imitate his
maker and "Create, create, create." This is the chief object of life.
Not alone in the propagation of his race, but to build houses and
temples, erect monuments, write books, fertilize deserts, and cause the
earth to blossom with new flowers of fragrance, and new thoughts of
beauty.
In order to thus glorify life and make it a divine ecstacy, and a
stepping-stone to celestial worlds, love must be the guiding star, and
will the creative-impulse. These two are the sovereign forces of the
universe in man and Deity; and uphold and control all others.
Therefore man should make love and truth his ideals, and will his
sceptre of power, and with each rising sun proclaim:
"These two things should no man forget or lose
Or sacrifice: his will and his ideals.
These two things are the man. In leaving them
Behind him in the dust of broken dreams
He leaves himself His nature is usurped.
The lesson of all greatness is to be
That which we are--out to our farthest bounds.
To lift the high within us higher still--
To delve our depths with a profounder depth--
To push the near horizon of our minds
Out past immediate things to ultimate."