There are often lives that are trembling toward completion, having longings, aspirations, prayers and hopes which certainly do not belong to the physical, but are the approximation of a nearer relation, an inner nnfoldment You have, perhaps, known gifted people, similarly endowed, who were merely kindred, but who have entered into a nearer relationship that has proven disastrous to both. Many of these instances might be cited in those intellectual marriages, so nearly do they resemble the real, so nearly are the ties of intellect and (esthetic taste like the ideal, that it is often the fatal mistake of genius to suppose that in another genius is to be found also the other portion of the Soul. Where, sometimes, such association has been but a blessed state of mutual helpfulness, there are other lives where it has been shipwreck and disaster, not from any immorality in either, not from any fault that could be named, but from the mistaken idea that that kinship is Soul-marriage.

There is always a restless period accompanying any reform. These agitations afford most singular illustrations of what we are now teaching: that wherever the changes of such revolution affect the intellectual, political and religious states, they affect marriage. Under imperial decrees there are marriages formed or abrogated, set aside or increased; in periods of speculation as in France or in this country, marriage becomes a commodity, a matter of barter and sale. In periods of revolution all marriage is lightly set aside and lightly entered because every depth of human life is being stirred. This is why many reformers, springing toward the ideal, as in the German "Storm and Stress" period, or in the French Revolution, or in the earlier Grecian history, or as in more recent times, have expected the perfect marriage on earth before there were perfect men and women.

The highest law of Christian lands is the marriage law, as the highest state of Christian society is the marriage state, the bulwark of all social and moral ideals. The mistake is in supposing that the ordinance makes perfection; it is the state in each individual that makes the perfect or imperfect marriage. By laws man merely regulates the differences that must arise in states that are inferior to perfection, but the Divine law is in itself the ordinance of Heaven. That which made the typical man and woman in Eden, before and after the fall, cling together, makes marriage sacred in the light of Heaven, as truth unto the present state. No one can depart or fall from that truth and win the highest, because the highest must grow up from within. As marriage is the highest state of civilization, so its abuse by perversion, by force, by unjust laws, must constitute the deepest source of human misery. There must come a state to the whole world, as there has come to individuals and groups of Souls, when all dross will be put aside and the Soul will be one in this state. Each will become the angel again.

The Souls embodied here do not pass back through the Eden state, but through the experiences of darkness and light, Borrow and joy, tribulation and conquest, reach perfection; and this perfection can not be reached until all earthly things are vanquished. Foregleams of this ideal state, prophecies of this divine fulfillment have been given in the perfect lives of past dispensations, and in the expressions of Genius, whose Soul-dreams become the reality of the perfect human paradise.

This Soul-marriage is the theme of many writings; many songs and man; philosophies; of music, poesy, painting, sculpture; so does it pervade and imbue literature and art, and different forms of philosophy, that it has become accepted generally in human thought that this perfect Soul-union most belong to the perfect human state, when that state becomes divine.

The Deities of antiquity reveal this Soul possession as the final recognition on earth. Osiris and Isis were a prophecy; also Jove and Maia, and the enthralling divinities that clustered around Olympus and Parnassus. Great scholars, teachers and geniuses, as Cadmus, the builder of the city of Thebes, and the inventor of sixteen letters of the Greek alphabet; he it was who searched in vain for his sister, his spouse. Plato pictured the ideal of his Soul in the divine "Una." Dante, at Florence and Verona, exiled, bereft and lone, revealed in his sublime vision Beatrice, who from out her Paradise taught him the words and works of his divine poem, gave him the syllables in which to breathe it to the world, and across the only stream which divided them, which was human life and his earthly state, gave him the White Rose of Immortal Love.

Schiller's "Mystery of Reminiscence" is the surpassing poem of this Soul recognition:

"Who and what gave the wish to woo thee, Still lip to lip to cleave for aye unto thee, What made me long thy very breath to drink, Thy soul in mine to sink?

"As from the conqueror's unresisted glave Flies without strife, subdued, the ready slave, So, when to life's unguarded fort I see Thy gaze draw near and near triumphantly. Yields not my soul to thee?

"Were once our beings blent and intertwining. And for that glory still my heart is pining; Knew we the light of some refulgent sun When once our souls were one?

'"Round us in waters of delight forever Raviahingly flowed the heavenly nectar river; We were the masters of the seal of things And where truth in her ever-living springs Quivered our glancing wings.

"Weep for the godlike life we lost afar, That thou and I its scattered fragments are, And still the onconquered yearning we retain. Sigh to renew the long and vanished reign. And grow divine again."

We have only quoted a portion of this beautiful poem, also wonderfully rendered into your own tongue by one of your own poets - Longfellow: Shelley's rare but imperfectly understood ideal, as revealed in the Soul-poem "Epipsychidion," portrays this possible recognition as seen in the highest realm of poeey, which is also the realm of inspiration.