The destiny of each soul is reunion with the Absolute from which it emanated. But this reunion may be accomplished only through yielding the claims of the personal self to the greater Self, the Christos which exists within each personality. A single word gives us the key to the process,—brotherhood.

To this goal there is one royal road and many that are long and terrible. But the royal road may be travelled only by those who are immune from temptation because their consciousness is not centred in the self which may be tempted. Understanding the law, they obey it, for only by obedience may the law be transcended and the soul become free. That is a royal road, indeed. But it is only for the few.

The other, cyclic and steep as the pathway that winds to the summit of the Purgatorio mountain, must for ages be travelled by the multitudes; for it is they who cannot as yet answer the questions, "Whence came I? wherefore do I exist, and whither do I go?"

Spirit, when first differentiated from the Absolute, is simple, not complex, undifferentiated, pure and good because it has not become conscious of evil. To gain the experiences by which alone it may expand its consciousness to infinity and become inclusive of all differentiation, it becomes individualized and embodied. And this earth is the scene of the experiences which the spirit needs and which it can gain only by means of an embodiment of personality.

Cycle after cycle, life after life, the soul tests all the conditions of earthly pleasure and pain by its own standard and measure. If that standard be self, alienation will be swift and certain, and slow and terrible will be the return to the divine. If the measure be brotherhood, service, ministry to others, the soul remains one with God and spiritual consciousness is by so much expanded.

Since brotherhood is the ideal, our very institutions, church, state, and particularly the home, exist for no higher purpose than to develop within the soul of humanity a conscious desire to live for others. It is only because the soul manifests itself as two forces, in two sexes, man and woman, that the institution of the home, as we know it, is made possible. We fancy that these dual forces, incomplete and fluctuating, become completed and stable only through marriage. The novelists have threshed over this old straw for many weary years, for the view commonly taken is superficial and untrue.

Marriage, in its deeper aspect, is a means by which the soul prepares itself, through the joys of limited service, for that wider ministry which includes the world. Emerson expresses it better when he says "the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls." Marriage opens the shortest way by which men and women, self-centred and egotistical, may be compelled, against their will if need be, to become conscious of the joy of sacrifice and the beauty of service.

The child, like the childish race, is, in some respects, very much of a savage. He has neither intellectual nor ethical ideas and, as Froebel expresses it, "the first circle of a child's life is physical nature bound by necessity." The baby cares only to be kept physically comfortable, and he proposes to be kept so at the expense of others as far as possible. He is a little egotist. The world is his oyster. Selfishness, if he be not guided, is far more native to him during the earliest period of his life, than altruism. And it is significant that a large proportion of children grow into manhood and womanhood, particularly in these days of ferment and individualism, with the firm belief that, first of all, they must look out for themselves. They do not voluntarily accept the path of brotherhood, but the law, the wise law, forces them, by few or many hard experiences, to finally see the wisdom of choosing it. By refusing to obey the law they place themselves within the sweep of its mighty arm and are struck down.

We are all one; we minister to ourselves only as we minister to others. We must first sacrifice self, else all the rest will not be added unto us and even that which we have will be taken away. But before we are capable of the wider ministry, we must prove ourselves by the narrower service, and nature, with her wise economy, leads us into a field wherein service and sacrifice are inevitable, and its gateway is marriage.

Emerson gives us the key to this mystery when he says: "The man is only half himself; his other half is his expression." The true expression is service, the ideal which leads us to accept it is brotherhood, and to that expression the other sex is only the embodied opportunity. To that expression marriage is the guardian and the gateway only as husband and wife accept all its culture and all its sacrifices, patiently, joyfully, completely. That signifies, ordinarily, that both husband and wife must lose their personal selves in their children, and if, for selfish reasons, they refuse this service, they are missing the culture of this incarnation. If they refuse it for reasons that are unselfish, for the opportunities of a wider ministry, that is, as Kipling would say, "another story." That is the supreme sacrifice.

It is, in most cases, wiser for husband and wife to fill their home with little children for two reasons. In the first place, through the care of children (the care of their minds and souls not less than of their bodies), each forgets self and learns the A B C of that great lesson in ministry which alone will make universal brotherhood possible upon the face of the earth. Because these sacrifices are more inevitable to the mother than to the father, she is likely to learn this lesson more speedily, and perhaps that is one reason why the Ego clothes itself now in one sex and now in another in the course of its earthly experiences. Perhaps it is that we may learn this lesson of sacrifice well that the newly embodied soul inflicts upon the builders of its physical body such agonies, sacrifices, and anxieties, that their souls seem to be torn up by the very roots, only to be planted, when quiet comes again, upon a higher plateau and in an atmosphere less dense. Emerson has said truly, "Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it."

Under existing conditions the lesson of selflessness will have to be learned by most of us through this very differentiation of sex, and we may make as much ado about it as we please. We may learn it through the agony and the terror of a Hetty Sorrel or a Margaret, both of whom were examples of extreme selfishness; we may accept it gracefully, as do the average man and woman, with a very faint comprehension of what it all means; or we may welcome and glorify parenthood as the Madonna glorified it, prophesy of that future time when every child shall be the child of an immaculate conception. "Help nature and work on with her, and nature shall regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance."[2]

The second reason why the selfish person is delaying his own advancement by refusing to fulfill the duties that he tacitly accepts by marriage is very prosaic. We all like to assure ourselves that we are rays of the Infinite, channels through which alone the God-message may be brought to mankind. That is very inspiring. But it is not so inspiring to reflect that we are also the gateways, self-appointed by the very estate of marriage, through which other souls, more advanced than ourselves perhaps, may come into the physical embodiment which they need for future experience. That is quite another thing, and all the old self which binds our souls rebels. For this means, to a great degree, the sacrifice of our social pleasures, our recreations, time, money, physical ease, perhaps health; it means broken rest, disorderly rooms, the washing of bedaubed little hands, and the kissing of, oh, such dirty little mouths. It means that we have to shut our Æschylus and shelve our Faust and our Homer for a few years at least, and many a father and mother look back with something like longing upon the old days when they lived with these great souls and when their cherished books were not smeared as to bindings and torn as to leaves.

Was it an accident that Froebel called the system of education that he gave to the world "the science of motherhood"? Was it accidental that he should dedicate the deepest and truest philosophy of which I have any conception to the end that the father and the mother, and through them, the child, might become able to look beneath the visible for the invisible which conditions it; beneath the outer phenomena to the spirit which gives it birth; beyond the transitory to the permanent. Such a philosophy makes one very patient with physical duties and sacrifices when they are regarded as only a means to an end that is higher than physical. Such a philosophy makes it somewhat easier to "step out from sunlight into shade to make more room for others."

That is, to me, the ethical side of the now-existing relationship of the sexes about which the reformers are making so much ado. It is these who lament with such vigor the large families of the very poor. Looked at from the standpoint of the eternal, the growing number of childless families among the better classes is a much more serious state of affairs. Large and half-cared for families of children prove nothing more than ignorance on the part of the parents, of both spiritual and physical laws. And the suffering that this ignorance entails will inevitably lead the soul to a higher consciousness. But the other state of affairs is—with exceptions—the result of selfishness; and the more conscious the soul, the greater the alienation resulting from a selfish course of action. Says H.P.B., "The selfish devotee lives to no purpose. The man who does not go through his appointed work in life has lived in vain."

It is very noble to slay the appetites but that may occasionally be only a more subtle phase of selfishness. Besides that, desires that are slain for selfish comfort's sake do not free us from the law. That is why it is such nonsense to seek the solution of this old problem by placing the caprice or whim of the individual man or woman above the law of the universe. As long as men and women are selfish, as long as marriages are made from selfish motives, I bow before the rampant desires that shall force the soul into sacrifices until the self has disappeared. But when the law is obeyed, and when old Karmic debts are paid, woman and man will rise superior to it, the will of the individual become one with the universal will, and the spirit have gained her freedom.

Please do not mistake me. I do not believe that marriage is the only circumstance through which the sexes can become self-poised, completed and stable. I do not believe that those who marry should always accept the limited service that little children demand of them. I do not believe that the sacrifices of fatherhood and motherhood are the highest sacrifices. Nothing of the kind. Marriage is simply a means by which the less advanced souls, the feeble, the selfish, may rise out of feebleness into strength, out of self into God. Susan E. Blow, in her "Study of Dante," has defined the Inferno as the soul filled with self, the Purgatorio as the soul emptied of self, and the Paradiso as the soul filled with God. Dante himself, with his divine insight into the nature of sin, places the jealous souls (become so through selfishness extreme) in icebound Cocytus, at the very pit of the Inferno. To most of us marriage is indeed the gateway leading out of an Inferno of selfishness, and it is marriage that places upon our backs the precious burdens which we must carry up the Purgatorio mountain. "The more we climb the less it hurts until we seem to fly."[3] But climb we must until the burdens have all fallen and the self has disappeared. By the light of "the dim star that burns within" the cyclic path must be ascended. But when the top has been reached "its light will suddenly become the infinite light." We shall have entered the Paradiso.

Advanced souls, those who are capable of wider and better service, need not to complete themselves in marriage nor to find their expression in the opportunities it gives them. They are strong enough to find it voluntarily in a cause. They do not marry on the physical plane, but truly wedded are they on the spiritual plane and in that marriage to the needs of the world they find the other half, their expression. They cease their hovering between opposites and are stable.

Such souls were Michael Angelo and Raphael, who found complete expression in art. Socrates needed no wife. He found his expression in loafing on the street-corners and plying his mystic questions. Xantippe was clearly a superfluity and we do not blame her for scolding him when we remember that she had none of his philosophic insight to carry her over the desert of his neglect. Dorothea Dix, Florence Nightingale and hundreds of other souls have found their appropriate expression in ministry to physical suffering. H.P.B., great loving heart, forgot self in a sublime service of the mind and of the spirit. Such souls do not drift nor waver; they need none of the experiences of physical fatherhood or motherhood; they are wedded to the needs of the world, they become spiritual fathers and mothers to its children, they find their expression in brotherhood, they are self-poised, completed, and at rest.