THE EVOLUTION OF A FATHER. 305 



the surest guarantees for the moral progress of a 

 nation. So long as the first concern of a country is 

 for its homes, it matters little what it seeks second or 

 third. Long before Evolution showed its scientific 

 interest in this first social aggregate, and proclaimed 

 it the strategic point in moral progress, poetry, philos- 

 ophy, and history assigned the same great place to 

 Family-life. The one point, indeed, where all students 

 of the past agree, where all prophets of the future 

 meet, where all the sciences from biology to ethics are 

 enthusiastically at one, is in their faith in the im- 

 perishable potentialties of this yet most simple insti- 

 tution. 



With all these barriers removed it might now be 

 supposed that the process was at last complete. 

 But one of the surprises of Evolution here awaits 

 us. All the arrangements are finished to fan the flame 

 of love, yet out of none of them was love itself be- 

 gotten. The idea that the existence of sex accounts 

 for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among 

 early races, as we have seen, has nothing to do with 

 love. Among savage peoples the phenomenon every- 

 where confronts us of wedded life without a grain of 

 love. Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex 

 relation ; it is not an outgrowth of passion. Love is 

 love, and has always been love, and has never been 

 anything lower. Whence, then, came it ? If neither 

 the Husband nor the Wife bestowed this gift upon the 

 world, Who did ? It was A Little Child. Till this 

 appeared, Man's affection was non-existent ; Woman's 

 was frozen. The Man did not love the Woman ; the 

 Woman did not love the Man. But one day from its 

 Mother's very heart, from a shrine which her husband 

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