Marriage is from nature, and is simply an attachment. Some see a great significance in marriage, believing that couples are born and made for each other. Others believe that this attachment is but the outcome of the nearness of two individuals to each other, which, developing, leads them to form a partnership.

Actually one sees marriages which illustrate both these ideas. The first may be seen operating in the vegetable kingdom; it may be traced in the position of two leaves on the same stem, one balancing the other and responding to the other. The second may be seen ruling in the animal world, where mates become attached to each other through propinquity, until something comes to disturb their lives together; and then, absent from one another, they forget each other and readily accept a new mate.

But man always has something of sincerity and faithfulness in his nature. Though he lives his life in a changing scene he values steadiness and constancy; the origin of his soul is indeed that one and eternal Spirit which does not change. And it is this human tendency to constancy that has helped to bring about the recognition of the attachment between man and woman, a recognition that has developed into the many and varied institutions of marriage. For the human pair so attached have wished to think of themselves as united in a desire for constancy; and they have also wished others to look upon them as a couple joined in a constant partnership.

The idea that an individual man or woman has been created the one for the other is found among all races at all times. It rests on common human experience. One often sees an individual, possessed of a desire to marry, who makes many friends without becoming attached to anyone; it seems as if he were groping towards his own mate who is destined for him, and cannot rest until he finds her. And again one sees two who have met many others without forming any real attachment, but who upon meeting instantly feel united, as if they had been made for each other.

One sees that all creation is aiming at perfection. Every atom is working to fit into its proper place; and either it attracts or else it is attracted to the fulfillment of that perfection which is the reason for its existence. All the different particles of an object are in time brought together; no matter how scattered, eventually they meet; this is the secret underlying existence.

And the coming together of a man and woman who see their attachment to each other as something as sacred as religion, is true union; the hope with which they look for their partnership to endure in unbroken constancy makes theirs a real marriage; and in this ideal is found the perfection of human life.

But this natural, sacred union is influenced from both sides in the modern State: on the one side by the Church, and on the other side by the law. Marriage has degenerated into a business affair, advertised on all sides as subservient to ideas of material profit and advantage. It is even suggested now that an external authority shall decide whether a couple be physically fitted to marry, so that the liberty to make even this decision may be taken out of their own hands.

And once they are bound together, the laws of the Church keep a couple bound together whether the attachment proves to be real and sincere or not, making them captives for life; so that often the promise taken in the Church service is the only tie that remains, and it becomes a lock that secures the imprisonment of two lives. Having no joy in their union, a couple, mutually willing to part, may be thus debarred from experiencing the joy of a real marriage within their Church. And the social law stands ready to enforce captivity and to inflict punishment should they break their imprisonment; and thus prevents them from following that sacred path of real attachment which leads to perfection of life. For marriage is neither a religious ritual nor a business contract, though the attitude of the Church makes it appear as the one, and the State as the other.

The free-thinker, revolted by the purely formal marriage, goes to the opposite extreme, advocating what he calls free love. This ideal of free love, by which man and woman have entire freedom in marriage and divorce without reference to Church or State, will be practicable and possible when all the children of the community are equally under the care of the whole community. Nevertheless, for the individual to have this freedom without a spiritual ideal of life would prove a curse. For it must be acknowledged that the world, which is progressing in many directions, is weakening in others; and every day shows a weakening in the regard for purely spiritual ideas, such as are necessary in the democracy taught by the greatest teachers of humanity.

If the spirit of freedom becomes destructive it loses the essence of democracy. The true democrat says, "There is no one to whom I, in my humanity, will yield as to a superior"; but he also says, "there is no one among humanity whom I dare to despise or injure." Until that far-off day arrives when freedom exists everywhere alike for the strong or the weak, untainted by any spirit of intolerance, there must be safeguards to ensure order in the community. Until that day marriage, or the formal recognition of the human attachment, will be necessary, not only in order that the interests of the children may be safeguarded, but so that woman, who has neither in the East nor in the West that recognition which makes her socially as independent as her mate, and whose position in life from every point of view is consequently a more delicate one than his, shall not suffer unjustly.