The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love.—Thoreau.

MARRIAGE, although a most common incident in life, is understood as little as is birth, life and death. People are perpetually ignorant on the subject, and insist upon remaining in this state until the veil of their temple is rent in twain, and their holy of holies has daylight thrown upon it.

Love is a sacred mystery whose secret is as yet locked away from mortals. We recognize a few of its manifestations and dream of its power. We connect it in our thoughts with marriage and birth, but we assume its presence: we do not bring proof.

Love is spirit, and can not be analyzed nor understood.The most that man can apprehend of it is to know its absence or its presence. Its most refined manifestations have come to us with the development of intellect.

There are only a few examples of the manifestation of great love in history. So rare are the people capable of its expression that the whole world wonders and in awe has said that the Creator is Love.

And lovers have been set apart as belonging to the Great Mystery and revered in degree as is the Source of Love.

One of the phases of this manifestation in people is the desire to give. The lover withholds nothing from his beloved. There is one desire—to give all. Thus is the mind expanded until it reaches truth never before seen.

Love is the enlightener of the soul. It is the all-seeing eye that discovers the highest possibilities in man. Its eternal desire is to fulfil these.“I can do no ill, because I could not meet the beloved on terms of equality if there were any stain upon my soul. My hands and my heart must be clean.”

Love’s longing is to be entirely whole, clean and strong.

Love would never deceive. It is kindred only to truth and good.

All of life is sacred to the lover, and all life is sacred to him.

The lover is not so anxious that the beloved shall be perfect, as that she herself, he himself, shall be without blemish. Love purifies the lover. Love makes the lover clean.

There is no such thing as unrequited love, for to have loved is all the compensation there is. The soul asks no more.

There is a sublime dignity in love—a majesty that suggests unlimited power.

To love is an individual experience. The object of the love is only the means to this end of awakening and purification.When the lover asks aught from the beloved, he has descended from the spiritual estate and begins to haggle and barter. Then it is not love, but becomes something to buy and sell with.

Love radiates from the individual, as rays of light from its source.

When the lover wants to continue the ecstacy of the experience of unselfishness, prolong the forgetfulness of his sordid self, he does what? Just the opposite of what will secure for him this Nirvana! He begins to demand. He asks her to be forever near him, she asks him to forever stay, all in faith, believing that the soul-awakener is a person, when the person has only reminded the soul of an ideal. For a time this person keeps this ideal living before the soul of the lover.

Elbert Hubbard says, “I love you because you love the things I love.” There is a trinity in love. Lovers make the soul to see a similar ideal which both love.So long as each asks nothing from the other, makes no demand, this ideal may continue to come before the mind, and remain there while the person is present, and return at the thought of the beloved.