re we shall be able, like God, to give ourselves equally to all; but
while we are in the flesh we cannot share ourselves equally with all, and
any attempt to do so lowers the standard of perfect human love." I like
that, because it is based again on a loyal acceptance of human nature. We
are not yet as God in the sense that, being wholly spirit, we can share
ourselves equally with all. We do still live in bodies, and we have in this
life memory and prevision, and surely that is indeed an ideal union, if we
are looking for the highest, which is able to give its past and its future
as well as its present, so that the whole personality is involved, in
that act of union, and that anything short of that is at least not quite
perfect. Human beings are still in the body, and are yet soul and spirit in
that body, and must take both into account. Divorce the physical from the
spiritual in yourself, and you are violating yourself. Divorce the physical
from the spiritual in someone else--you who perhaps say: "I myself love
such a man, such a woman, with the best part of myself; what I do with
another is of no importance"--you violate the nature of that other from
whom you take what is physical, and leave what is spiritual as though it
were not there.

Your life, like your body, is too highly organized, too sensitive, too knit
together by memories and prevision for you to leave behind you anything
that has really entered into your life. It is a shoddy and superficial
nature that passes easily from experience to experience, and when you look
at such you can see how shallower still it becomes. It is the deeper and
the loftier nature that cannot enter into any human relationship and then
pass away from it altogether unchanged. And even that shoddy, that poor,
that mean little soul which seems to pass so lightly from one experience to
another does not really altogether escape. Some mark is left upon the soul,
some association remains in the memory; and again and again marriages have
been wrecked because a man has taken the associations of the gutter into
the sanctuary of his home. Unwillingly, with an imagination that fain would
reject the stain, he has injured, he has insulted the love that has now
come to him, the most precious thing on earth, because he has not known how
to do otherwise; because all the associations of passion have been to him
degraded, smirched, treated frivolously in the past. It is true of men; it
is also true of w