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The principles of matrimonial association are universal and eternal. The law of affinities develops the true relation between one atom as individual and another.² The association of particles or spirits, thus drawn to together, is an outward expression of inward marriage. The law of conjugal union is represented first in the structure of the Divine Mind and next in His relations to the universe. The essential elements of Divine Mind are embodied in the form of love and His attributes in the form of wisdom. Love is a female and wisdom a male principle, and these generate in their relation and unity the whole universe of matter and mind. Subsequent manifestations of conjugal union are less grand and perfect but not less unmistakable, throughout all kingdoms of Nature, and as in the Divine Mind so are its ultimate products—the human children of God.

¹ See The Great Harmonia, Vol. II, pp. 201-210, extracted and collated.
² The attraction involved herein is said to be the love-law of all organisation, and it is the same in the physical as in the spiritual world.—The Great Harmonia, Vol. IV, p. 277. Attraction in mind is identical with attraction in matter, and love is the life of atoms.—Ibid., p. 279. Wherever life is, there is attraction; and wherever attraction is, there is marriage. Attraction is the cause and marriage the effect thereof.—Ibid., p. 280. The love principle is the principle of life, for life and love are identical in essence. The principle assumes innumerable forms of manifestation, all of which spring from the Central Source of Life in the universe.—Ibid., pp. 73, 74. Marriage is the union of the essences of two atoms.—Ibid., p. 280.

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Every individual, in the abstract sense, is an embodiment of love and wisdom. The soul is organised into an image of love and intelligence, into an image of wisdom. So is each human soul constructed upon male and female principles. But every individual, considered in a relative sense, embodies only one of these principles and hence experiences affinity for its apparently dissimilar self. Heart calls to heart. The female is alone without her true companion and the male without the female. The one is seeking the wisdom principle and the other that of love. Soul is on quest of soul, and life looks for life. There is no happiness apart from true conjugal relation.

But conjugal love must be responded to by conjugal love, or else the spirit will be unhappy. The female, being love, possesses within her soul immortal springs of beauty; but if she be associated with a companion whose powers and attributes are insufficiently great and noble, kind and generous, the result is uneasiness and discord.¹ Hereof are the legalised attachments of worldly marriages, which not only distract but arrest the development of beauty and happiness in the enslaved soul. True marriages are natural, inevitable, harmonious, eternal; but no ceremony, no promise, no written agreement can unite that which is separated inwardly or increase the sanction of union in that which is eternally joined.² If two are married legally, and if this outer expression of unity has no other cause than fascinations of features, advantages of position or wealth, or accident of circum-

¹ It is said that on the inferior planes of the physical and human worlds there are perpetual marriages and divorces—being minor unions which are external and quickly terminated.—Ibid., p. 282.
² True marriage is not only the union of essences but it is likewise the interpenetration of the particles composing those essences. This is the only seal or test of real affinity.—Ibid. Marriage is immutable. Matter and mind are eternal, and by marriage they propagate the worlds. So is man's front brain married to his back brain; the two generate all the thoughts of human beings and fix the soul's individuality not less surely.—Ibid., p. 289.

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stance, then is the female living unconsciously with the companion of another spirit, and so also the male—in violation of conjugal law. Both are dissatisfied and unhappy. The best evidence that two individuals are not naturally and eternally married is when dissatisfaction and unhappiness are the consequences of external union, while harmony and contentment are outward signs of true inward union. The laws of God and Nature are superior to human enactments, yet we must submit to human legislation and conform thereto, looking for that time when it shall be at one with Divine Law.¹

Every individual is born married; every male and female has a true and eternal companion, depending on the spontaneous conjunction of affinities, of principle with principle and spirit with spirit.² A true conjunc-

¹ This notwithstanding, all minor marriages are transient, though they are or may be beneficial to the progressive development of mankind. The scale of marriage is septenary, being (1) Sexual, which—in its isolation from other motives—is brutal, fictitious and inconstant; (2) Circumstantial, or founded on external considerations, and this is the prevailing marriage of the present age; (3) Intellectual, or founded on mental appreciation, and this is at best the science of love, not love itself; (4) Religious, or springing from a sense of duty in obedience to religious theories; (5) Spiritual, or coming from mental fitness, and though not necessarily permanent it may so become; (6) Celestial, being the union of love and wisdom; and (7) Harmonial, being not only a union of love and wisdom but an interblending of two souls.—Ibid., pp. 300-306. The two last are distinguished by a trick of description rather than in their nature.
² This requires to be checked by a later statement, as follows: Every soul is born married—that is, each has a counterpart. But this counterpart was not foreordained. It is not a fixed law that a certain man shall ultimately wed eternally a certain woman, for the marriage relation is progressive and may pass through several points of discipline before the true counterparts meet to part no more.—Ibid., p. 304. The question of progressiveness does not belong to the subject, because it is allowed that temporary ties may be assumed before true counterparts meet to part no more; but the text above says that every male and female has an eternal companion, and that which is eternal is not only foreordained but actual, a parte ante et a parte post, which the text below denies.

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tion of souls is the invariable consequence of abiding in the Second Sphere. There is but one true marriage, and it is quite possible that a person who has had several companions on earth may not—even so—have met with the real associate of the spirit's joys and travellings. Let such spirit rest assured that it has a mate somewhere, somewhere an eternal associate. Perhaps the true companion has already gone before, and in such case the spirit on the search for its companion may well feel drawn toward the higher world.

When true union is enjoyed, the love principle, or the female, is the actuating, prompting, life-giving portion of the Eternal Oneness, and the wisdom principle is the governing, guiding and harmonising portion. Thus the twain are one in essence and organisation. There is one home, one purpose, one destiny, even as there is one God and one religion. The true marriage is first natural, then spiritual, then celestial in its progressive growth; and the eternally conjoined have an unfailing evidence of their destiny in the experience of a continually unfolding love one for another—growing stronger and stronger as they pursue life's path and near the Spirit's Home. The human soul is capable of inconceivable expansion; its sensibilities are almost immeasurable. The embodied principles of love and wisdom seek and implore the presence of each other. To every individual, its counterpart—or the one most loved—is purest, greatest, most beautiful of all beings, because there is an inwrought adaptation of desire to desire, impulse to impulse, organisation to organisation, soul to soul. This philosophy of marriage is that which angels know. It is the only true marriage, prophetically or incipiently indicated here on earth, enjoyed in all spheres of seraphic life, and established by that sublime law of association which unites atom to atom, spirit to spirit and God to the universe.

These principles of matrimonial union are self-

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evident to the spiritually enlightened, and as regards their daily application to the race as it now is, the male should seek the female with most pure and unselfish motives. The principle of internal affinity should alone actuate him in desire for a conjugal companion.¹ There is no security—no probability of happiness—apart from principle.² The indwelling consciousness of right in every mind cannot be violated with impunity. So also in the female, purity and permanency of mind, fulness and congeniality of soul should be the foundations of her attachment. She will never then repent the hour of marriage, as too many are compelled to do, having yielded to some external fascination, excitement or illusory advantage and thus secured to themselves a life of sadness and misery.³

¹ By such just, chaste and harmonial marriages alone, it is testified that healthy and well-constituted offspring can be brought into existence.—Penetralia, p. 77.
² The principle is, according to a later statement, that true marriage does not so much become spiritual as it is essentially of the spirit. It is the most interior and most divine relation possible among humankind. It is essentially and inevitably monogamic, considering woman as a Messiah of love to the man and man as a Messiah of wisdom to the woman. Herein lies the progressive perfectibility of mankind.—The Great Harmonia, Vol. IV, pp. 392, 395, 396.
³ At a much later date Davis issued a little volume called The Genesis and Ethics of Conjugal Love, which is useful as a summary of his opinions, though it contains very little that is new. He affirms (p. 19) that sex is derived from the spirit and that spirit is therefore the only cause of true marriage. So also conjugal love differs in its very nature from every other essential principle (p. 22), for its laws are spiritual and its conditions inmost and absolute. Love in its legitimate exercise is defined (p. 52) as the fulfilment of that conjugal law by which—from Divine Love and Divine Wisdom—woman and man were conceived and confirmed. True marriage—meaning an essential union of two spirits—is as rare as angels' visits (p. 77), but it often happens that blood-marriages are advanced to spiritual unity and happiness, because the lower includes the higher in a germinal or undeveloped state. As regards divorce, it is said (p. 97), somewhat convincingly, that if there be any criminality in the case, it is a greater crime to get wrongly into the marriage state than to be taken

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In general conclusion, righteous marriage¹—being for the human soul unspeakably superior to the mere incidental corporeal function of propagation, a function which covers, with utter satisfaction, the entire disc of the animal's periodical conjugal attraction—is the holiest relation and one most essential to perfect progression in Nature's pathway. It should therefore be steadily sought and lived for, from early youth to that period when the formation of such a blessed unity of spirit is at once chaste, beautiful, spiritualising, harmonial. It is a blessing to meet one's mate in early years, to form the heart attachment, live consecrated to that ideal, until the consummation of the outer relation, when the law of mutual and similar development will most naturally and spontaneously begin upon the twain its perfect work. The doctrine of the mutuality of spirit-growth, as the means of perpetuating otherwise transient unions, makes all conjugal infelicities quite perilous, if long indulged or permitted to strike deeply those chords which bind heart to heart. The intellectual faculties should be cultivated sufficiently to endow the affections with a clear image of the ideal companion, that one whom the soul's heart yearns to embrace evermore with a deathless love, deriving from the ever-breathing life of Deity.

legally out of it. A question, however, arises as to what becomes of that law of predestined marriages and the two halves of the soul—incomplete apart from each other—insisted on so strongly and at such length in The Great Harmonia, Vol. IV—what becomes of it if blood-marriages, meaning marriages rooted in mere sense and mere physical desire, can be promoted to the condition of love rooted in the spirit? It is curious that this difficulty—having occurred to Davis—is formulated at some length in The Ethics of Conjugal Love (p. 99), but he only suggests concerning it that an harmonious union formed on earth may be dissolved in the world to come, meaning that the predestined spouse and bride may meet there, all other earthly bonds notwithstanding. It remains, however, that spiritual unity is spiritual unity and can refer only to that state in which—according to the Davis hypothesis—marriage is indissoluble.
¹ See The Great Harmonia, Vol. IV, pp. 386, 387.

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Each individual needs this all-supporting, ever-watchful, beauty-giving, nuptial unity. Joy, enthusiasm, inspiration come with true marriage. Like a sweet aroma from a garden of immortal flowers cometh the love of the nuptial partner of our present and future progression. Each unto the other is the whole world—shall I say, God manifested in the flesh? The words of true love are words of God.