The Universe a Vast Electric Organism Part 15

If you are sick, love! If you are envied, hated and slandered, love! If age and death steal upon you, love! For G.o.d is love, and heaven is love, and love is life eternal. This is G.o.d'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 cla.s.sed 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 emanc.i.p.ate 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 n.o.ble 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 emanc.i.p.ate, exalt and enn.o.ble 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, s.e.xual 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 G.o.d's first command, "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth,"

can be consummated.

G.o.d has so organized the universe that love brings life and continues it, while hatred checks all the sweet gus.h.i.+ng juices and joys of hope and life, and, brings death and darkness. Love commands the electric creative forces of human life as G.o.d commands them in the boundless heavens. Love is the elemental part of G.o.d, and the G.o.dly 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 G.o.d the Creator and Preserver of the human race.

All that live must come from loving In the hallowed name of wife, G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.dmother 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 a.n.a.lysis and subverts all law of animate and inanimate nature. G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 a.s.sert its divine right to correct the blunders of ignorance and superst.i.tion.

And as it was many ages before the fatherhood of G.o.d and the brotherhood of man was discovered and recognized, so it required modern intelligence and reason to place woman in her true and G.o.d-given position; and recognize in G.o.d the Father, G.o.d the Son and G.o.d 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 a.s.serts 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 s.e.x in all nature, it is reasonable to believe there is s.e.x 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 wors.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d'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 n.o.bility of its mothers, for without n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 G.o.d and nature, or leave this high and holy vocation to the ignorant and superst.i.tious of our foreign element? If so, the citizens.h.i.+p of our beloved nation will degenerate with each succeeding generation.

Will the modern woman seek social pleasures and the flattery of pa.s.sing admiration in lieu of home life and maternity, and be satisfied to flutter as a gaudy b.u.t.terfly of fas.h.i.+on? 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-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d 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, n.o.blest 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 G.o.dlike 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 G.o.d'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 s.e.xual, with love as the supreme sovereign of all life and destiny.

Magnificent are the pyramids of Cheops, but while they and the groves of G.o.ds and pillars at Karnac were being reared for a tyrannous n.o.bility 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 G.o.d. 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 s.h.i.+llings. 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 aegis 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 G.o.d of all the G.o.ds 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: