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The greater the imaginative altitude of love, the
lower the boiling point. But Love cannot always be kept at high pressure. * * * The young think love is the winning-post of life,
the old know it is a turn in the course.
Nevertheless, it is a fateful turn. * * * In love, the imagination plays a very large
part. And this may be variously interpreted. Thus, By man, love is regarded as a sort of sacred
religion; by woman, as her every-day morality. The former is the more exhilarating; but the
latter is more serviceable. Indeed, Love and religion are very near akin: both
inspire, and both elevate. And If faith, hope, and charity are the basis of
religion, there never was such as religion as love. And Love is the only religion in which there have
been no heretics. Why? Because woman are at once its object and its
priesthood. Love, art, and religion are but different phases
of the same emotion: awe, reverence, worship, and sacrifice in the
presence of the supreme ideal. Love knows no creed. Nay more, Love acknowledges no deity but itself and accepts
no sanctions but its own: it is autonomous.
And yet— And yet, love sometimes feels constrained to
offer a liturgical acquiescence to the rubric of Reason. In short, Between the prelatical domination of Reason and
the recusant Protestantism of Love there has ever been strife. Or, in plain language, There are two codes of
ethics: one that of the romantic heart; the other that of the practical
head. Who shall assimilate them? The heart, in its profoundest depths, feels that
something is due to Reason; and Reason, in its highest flights, feels that
something is due to the heart. Is there a divine duplicity in the human soul?
And yet, after all, All love seeks is: love. Yet love little knows that In seeking love, love enters on an endless
search. Since Love is an endless effort to realize the
Ideal. For Love always beckons over insurmountable barriers
to uninhabitable realms; promises insupportable possibilities; lures to an
unimaginable goal. Yet
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