Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women, page 109 by George Sumner Weaver
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eligion. Man and woman are a related pair. God has made them so. The relation they bear to each other is a divine one. It takes hold of the heart of life. It spans our whole manhood. It enters into our hopes, aims, and prospects. It holds its scepter over our business, our amusements, our philosophy, and religion. Its sphere is larger than we at first imagine. The relation is deeper and broader than we have yet comprehended. It lies in the very being of every man and every woman. There is in humanity two grand primary and universal principles of being--the masculine and feminine. They bear such a relation to each other that the one is essential to the action of the other. They mutually electrify and empower each other. It is in this mysterious relation that Infinite Wisdom has laid the springs of animate being. If any one mystery of our existence is deeper than any other, it is that which lies in the solemn depths of this relation. We ought to approach it wrapt in reverential awe and wonder. We look out on the earth in its brilliant beauty and teeming activity, and up to the heavens in their gorgeous glory and magnificent movements, and are oppressed with profound astonishment at what we behold. Yet all this we can in a measure comprehend. At least the secondary causes of the physical universe are clear to our minds. We can measure them with the line of mathematics; we can weigh them in the balance of reason. But when we turn in upon ourselves we meet a universe ten thousand times more wonderful and glorious, yet wrapt in the deep mystery of spiritual being. It is practical irreverence not to look upon our relations with religious respect. Of all these relations, the one between man and woman takes the most direct held of our practical life and enters most largely into the details of our purposes and thoughts. Men and women live in and for each other more than for any thing else. The fact stands out on the face of human society. We must take the fact as we find it. We did not make human nature; hence we have no r