The Wedding Guest

AN eloquent, true, and beautiful article from the pen of a woman and a wife (and no woman not a wife, do we believe fully competent to write on this subject), recently met our eyes in the pages of a periodical.  Its title was “Conjugial Love.”  The Latin word conjugial was used by the writer to indicate the true spiritual union of man and wife in contradistinction to the mere natural union as expressed in the word conjugal.  From this article let us make an extract—­

“Man is an angular mathematical form, exactly true, but not beautiful.  Woman seizes this form, and from the crucible of her warm love she moulds the truth into grace and beauty.  For man’s understanding deals in outermost truths.  But the Lord has blessed woman with perceptive faculties above the sphere of man’s reason, and while he looks to the outermost relations of things she at a glance perceives the inmost.  Hence she becomes, as it were, the soul of his thought; she is the will and he the intellectual principle; she is governed and guided by him, while he in all things is modified by her will, and scarce recognises his own crude thought in her plastic feminine representation of it; hence he thinks oftentimes that he acts from her wisdom, forgetting that she has no wisdom except through him.

“Thus woman dwells in the heart of man, as in some fair and stately palace, and she looks forth into his garden of Eden, his whole spirit world of thought; she knows every lofty tree, every blooming flower and odorous plant and herb for the use of man, and every singing bird that soars heavenward in her beautiful domain, and she culls the fairest of flowers and weaves bright garlands, and adorns the brow of her beloved with his own thoughts, while he even thinks that she is bestowing treasures out of herself upon him.  This gives to woman a sportive grace, a gentle lovingness, an apparent wilfulness, a delight in the power which she has through man, while she knows that he is the link that binds her to Heaven, and thus she is humble and grateful and yielding in the height of her power.  How beautiful is the life of conjugial partners!  The woman flows into the thought of man like influent life; she knows all things that are in him, hence she can adapt herself to his every variation; she calms him when excited, elevates him when he is depressed, regulates him by her heaven-given power, as a good heart regulates the judgment.  The Lord loves the man through the woman, and loves the woman through the man, and these two distinct and separate confluent streams, from the fountain of Divine life, rejoice in their blessed and beautiful union, as like ever does when it meets its like.  And it is only when the two streams unite that they can reflect the Divine image; they are noisy, turbulent, and turbid; until the meeting of the waters of life, and then in a calm, serene, deep, and beautiful blessedness they flow on so softly and smoothly that the holy heavens and the Divine sun mirror themselves in the clear waters; and if night, chill and drear, draws its darkening curtain around them, soon the silver moon of a trusting faith floods them with a gentle radiance, and bright stars of intelligence gild the night’s darkness, and they patiently await the dawn of an eternal day, when their joyous waters will again flow in the sunshine of heaven.”

“When the Lord in His Divine Providence brings the two together, in this life, that were created the one for the other, their union is wrought out by slow degrees.  The false and evil is to be put off before the Divine life can ultimate itself—­an unceasing regeneration is going on—­a purifying from self-love is the daily life of two partners.  The wisdom which the man has from the Lord, and the love which the woman has from Him, are ever seeking conjunction.  But the false and the evil that clings to every earthly being is constantly warring against this Heavenly union; in conjugial partners, hell is opposed to heaven, and it is only by a steady looking to the Lord, that Heavenly love can be preserved.  The Lord opens the inmost degree of thought and feeling in the two, and elevates their love to higher planes, and thus increases their joys and felicities; and when it is a true spiritual love, an entire union of heart and mind, then the two have entered heaven, and enjoy its beautiful blessedness even while their material bodies yet dwell upon this coarse outer world.

“How wonderful is the wisdom of the Lord!  How blessed is His love, in thus creating two that they may become a one!  The sympathy, the gentle affection, the loving tender confidence, that, like magnetic thrills, makes one conscious of the inmost life of the other, gives a charm—­a fulness of satisfaction—­a serene blessedness to existence, that no isolated being can possibly conceive of, let external circumstances be what they may.

“Conjugial love is independent of external circumstances; it is heaven-derived, and receives nothing from the earth.  It gives heavenly joy to all of its surroundings.  It is that glorious inner sunshine of life, that blesses the poor man as boundlessly as the rich.  And how beautiful it is for two to realize that time and space have nothing to do with their union.  In each other they see eternity; they know from whence their emotions flow, and know that the fountain is Infinite.  The Lord is the beginning and end; to them, the first and the last.  They live in Him, from Him, and to Him.  They love only His Divine image in each other; they seek to do good to others, as organs of His Divine life.  He is the glory and blessedness of their whole being.

“And if such blissful emotions can be realized in this cold, hard, ungenial, outer life, what must it be when the two pass into the conscious presence of the Divine Father, and behold each other not in angular material forms, and dead material light, but in the Divine light of Heaven, in Heavenly forms,—­radiant in intelligence glowing in the rosy love of eternal youth—­beautiful in the ’beauty of the Lord?’”

How pure, how wise, how beautiful!  Here is the true doctrine, that man and woman are not equal in the sense so often asserted in these modern times; that they are created with radical differences, and that the life of neither is perfect until they unite in marriage union—­one man with one wife.