Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/105

This page needs to be proofread.

A man seeks a wife who has the merits which he lacks, and the man and wife are one in their posterity. Short men marry tall. Straight locks love the curly. Strong passions love the gentle; and the timid admire the confident and the brave. All this is excellent, preserving the harmony of the race. Should men love their kind,—big mouths marry big mouths, big noses marry big noses, stubborn men marry stubborn women, and so on, we might breed a monstrous perfection of parts, but hardly a perfect harmony of system.

And now, for the satisfaction of such as may fail to find the compensation of their entire experience, let us advance a proposition:—All successes may be classed as either carnal or spiritual, either in this life or in all succeeding lives. If he that thinks himself entirely unsuccessful in this life will believe, (what is not improbable,) that every succeeding life exists on a more spiritual plane, he will not fail to see that the training he has received—the carnal successes he has failed of, shall be compensated by the fitness he has acquired for that advanced position,—of which advanced position the faulty parts of his compensation are but the foundation for most reasonable prophecy. Then say:

We shall not complete life's compensation here, but it shall wait for us at the threshold of the seventh—yea, the seventieth heaven. When this carnal race shall touch a more spiritual basis,—when its successes, its powers, and its places shall be won by the mind, rather than the body,—by the harmony of the soul, rather than by subserviency to corruption,—

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.