Amorites

“ In Palestine also we still come across representatives of a fair-complexioned blue-eyed race, in whom we may see the descendants of the ancient Amorites, just as we see in the Kabyles the descendants of the ancient Libyans. ”

“ From the prophetical parts of that Word Moses has taken this passage:—"Wherefore say the Enunciators, Go unto Heshbon; let the city of Sihon be built and strengthened; for a fire is gone out of Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon; it hath consumed Ar of Moab, the possessors of the high places of Arnon. Woe unto thee, Moab! thou art undone, people of Chemosh! He hath given his sons that escaped and his daughters into captivity unto Sihon, king of the Amorites; we have slain them with darts. ”

“ A thousand years before David, a thousand years before the siege of Troy, a city stood upon the bluff overhanging the stream which is now called Tell el Hesy. The site formed a natural fortress. The first city was built by the Amorites. This city was taken, sacked, and destroyed, in one of the countless tribal wars. But the site was too important for the place to be left long deserted; another town was raised upon the ruins. Note that they did not clear away the rubbish when they re-built: they raised the new town upon the débris of the old. ”

“ That was all of it--quiet, simple, truthful; based upon the very highest mutual love, respect, and trust; but no grand ceremonial that human pride ever imagined, or human lips pronounced, could have any more thoroughly bound and consecrated them unto each other for life and death than did that simple, heart-felt covenant. For in those days, and in the Christian communities, marriage was not of compulsion, or of trade, convenience, ambition, but of free, intelligent choice; and among those people the equally shameful blasphemies of adultery and divorce were utterly unknown. ”

“ As in providence not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father’s permission and regard, so in the new covenant not a tear falls for sin indulged, not a sigh rises for deliverance from its pollution, without attracting the notice and obtaining the approval of the Sinner’s Friend. Love, burning as a night lamp silently in a penitent’s breast, or bursting forth in impetuous praise, or calmly supplying the motive power of a useful life—love in the heart of the forgiven sinner, serves and pleases the forgiving Redeemer. ”

“ In antiquity, marriage was a duty to society; friendship, on the other hand, was the free expression of sympathy. Not until man’s consciousness admitted a soul in woman, could personal love arise. But so mysterious are the influences through which the soul of mankind grows, that the youthful love of the ancients indirectly developed the need of sympathy also between grown men and women; and the suppression of the sexual instinct by Catholic asceticism indirectly furthered the introspective, soulful emotion of love which rises above sensuality. ”

“ To me these reproaches, Ambrosio? To me, who have sacrificed for you the world’s pleasures, the luxury of wealth, the delicacy of sex, my Friends, my fortune, and my fame? What have you lost, which I preserved? Have I not shared in your guilt? Have you not shared in my pleasure? Guilt, did I say? In what consists ours, unless in the opinion of an ill-judging World? Let that World be ignorant of them, and our joys become divine and blameless! Unnatural were your vows of Celibacy; Man was not created for such a state; And were Love a crime, God never would have made it so sweet, so irresistible! ”

“ True love, the love of which true marriages are made, is friendship transfigured—the halo, the glory, of a supreme emotion coming to crown that which is most enduring on this earth. Just as we say that our religion is morality, is duty, only etherealised by viewing it as the expressed mind and will of the Soul of all souls, the World-intelligence, so do we think of marriage as based on a union of souls by friendship, inspired by a deep mutual respect, not for what the partners have, but for what they are, and finally made glorious in the light of an unfading love. ”

“ I lust for the enjoyment of your person. The woman reigns in my bosom, and I am become a prey to the wildest of passions. Away with friendship! 'tis a cold unfeeling word: my bosom burns with love, with unutterable love, and love must be its return. Tremble then, Ambrosio, tremble to succeed in your prayers. If I live, your truth, your reputation, your reward of a life past in sufferings, all that you value, is irretrievably lost. I shall no longer be able to combat my passions, shall seize every opportunity to excite your desires, and labour to effect your dishonour and my own. ”

“ Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress’s presence? Whoever heard of a man’s face launching as much as an upriver punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man’s eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making—making—a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now. ”

“ This is clearly perceived by consorts in heaven; and they also perceive that the more faithfully they do the will of the Lord, the more are their minds opened to the reception of his love and wisdom, and the more do they experience of their heavenly delights in the love they feel for each other. And it is given them further to perceive that conjugial love corresponds to the marriage of the Lord with his church; for as husband and wife in heaven mutually love each other, so the Lord loves the church, his Bride, and forever wills that it should love and be conjoined with Himself, her Husband. ”

“ The man whom thou hast chosen, by false Aphrodite's doom, thou shalt love as the Pathian said. More, thy love shall bring his blood upon thy hands, nor mayest thou follow him to the grave. For I will show thee the Source of Life and thou shalt drink of it to make thyself more fair even than thou art and thus outpace thy rival, and when thy lover is dead, in a desolate place thou shalt wait in grief and solitude till he be born again and find thee there. ”

“ Their special objection to love is, that just as monastic life and the celibacy of the clergy during the Middle Ages and down to the present day have deprived the race of excellent qualities—since the most gifted often choose the calm of the cloister or the call of the priesthood—so now many of the best men and women are kept from marriage by the dream or by the loss of a great love’s happiness. ”

“ But amid all the self-denial with which they fitted themselves for their glorious destiny, nothing in their character is more striking than the tender affection—passing ordinary human love—apparent in their intercourse with their families, as if religion had refined every fibre of their hearts, and made them more keenly susceptible of love, of suffering, and of devotion to the service of God. They never allowed earthly affections, however, to come between them and their great aim in life. What angels of the sanctuary they were while preparing for the sublime functions of the priesthood! ”

“ How must a Héloïse, who, although surrounded by the piety of the Middle Ages, would rather be the lover than the legal wife of Abèlard — how must she appear to you, coarse fellows, who judge love only from the standpoint of priests, and motherhood from that of the shopkeeper! ”

“ The Catholic Church maintains—and rightly from its own point of view—that, since even marriages entered into with the warmest love and under the most favourable conditions may turn out unhappily, it is impossible to base the morality of marriage on the emotion of love. Nothing that is founded upon emotion can be permanent. Nay, the richer, the more individually and universally developed a personality is, the less immutable will be the state of its soul. ”

“ Not here, perhaps, but in that sphere of being where love is indeed the fulfilling of the law, shall the patient givers, those who have served at love's altars, find themselves closely allied to the immortal ones, "who do his pleasure."
Love, garlanded, and adorned with all that wealth can bestow, enthroned in seats of honor, and social recognition is accepted as our ideal of what love should claim, and win from life ”

“ In respect of love indeed, not the Roman only, but Greek and Roman alike, are immeasurably inferior to those which many modern nations could supply. Thus a proverb of such religious depth and beauty as our own, Marriages are made in heaven, it would have been quite impossible for all heathen antiquity to have produced, or even remotely to have approached. ”

“ And the reason is, that the Creator has so constituted the human soul that no single one is complete or whole in itself, but only in union with another.
And because of this inborn constitution of the sexes, and because every soul takes with it into the other world all its innate characteristics, wants and appetencies, therefore man and woman must mutually desire to be joined in marriage in the great Hereafter, and marriages must exist in heaven. For the angels being of both sexes, and endowed with an ardent longing for union with each other, would be unhappy if such union were denied them. ”

“ O turn not away those dazzling suns of light that guide me to my happiness; but let those orient eyes shine upon me with beams of eomfort that I may live by the brightness of their lays, and the smiles of my fair Hero. He would have proceeded, but Hero entreated him to rise, and Amorissa advising them to go into the arbour, as well to keep them from the heat, as from the prying eyes that might be upon them: the two lovers obeyed, being both overjoyed at so happy a meeting. ”

“ Satan ever ready to corrupt the pure precepts and practises of the sacred Word has led people into the disgraceful fanaticism of promiscuous kissing. Such is not a kiss of love, but a kiss of lust. Everything done in the order of the kingdom of heaven is done in the perfection of decency and respectability. How natural for the fond husband to embrace and kiss the beloved wife, and the devoted mother her child, the brother his sister, all because love exists consistent [pg 167] with natural relation. But the strongest tie of love that binds hearts together is the Christian love. ”

“ The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul.... ”

“ To the gross apprehension of the Reformation period the choice of a personal love meant nothing. With marriage possible from a natural point of14 view alone, it might be contracted with any one; indeed, to the genuinely pious it seemed a higher thing to enter into matrimony without any earthly love, which interfered with the love of God. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage made God “indulgent” towards all the impurity that the sexual life shut up within the whited sepulchre of lawful wedlock. ”

“ We thus see how the love between married pairs in heaven, called conjugial love, differs from the natural man's love of the sex—a love which often leads to unions here on earth which we call marriage, but which are as purely natural and external as is the love that leads to them.
In heaven there exists, we are told, the most delightful freedom—the freedom of perfect love. The love of rule, or of exercising dominion, one over the other, is wholly unknown among angelic consorts. ”

“ For seeing that the marriage ceremony itself ought to be sanctified by the priestly veil and benediction, how can that be called a marriage when there is not agreement in faith? Since their prayers ought to be in common, how can there be the love of a common wedlock between those whose religion is different. Often have men ensnared by the love of women betrayed their faith, as did the Jews at Baal-phegor. Num. xxv. 8. For which cause Phineas took a sword, and slew the Hebrew and the Midianitish woman, and appeased the Divine vengeance, that the whole people might not be destroyed. ”

“ And so I have: and what better thing can you do, gentlemen, than to drink each other's healths all round likewise: and so show yourselves true gentlemen, true Christians, ay, and true lovers? For what is love (let me speak freely to you, gentlemen and guests) what is love, but the very inspiration of that Deity whose name is Love? Be sure that not without reason did the ancients feign Eros to be the eldest of the gods, by whom the jarring elements of chaos were attuned into harmony and order. How, then, shall lovers make him the father of strife? ”

“ True, Christianity discourages conjugal unions in which that affection does not exist, but it does not create it; nor was there anything whatever in pagan customs or institutions to prevent the existence of the warmest and purest affection between husband and wife. The sole conditions in the ancient world that militated against pure and constant married love were the customary unions of expediency and the inferior position of the wife. As to the first of these customs, it is by no means unknown in the modern world and to Christian times ”

“ We all speak of the world as we find it. This was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the world’s wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication?
Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began to multiply. ”

“ That’s flat. I see my nights being spent over figures and telegrams and all that sort of thing for some time to come.... Don’t think [482] I’ve forgotten. I understand perfectly. I suppose that sooner or later it will have to be the Continent and so on—but not until this job’s settled. Not till then. Everything else—everything—has got to stand down. You do see, don’t you, Amory? I hope you do.”
As he had talked there had come over Amory a sense of what his love must be if nothing but his relentless sense of duty could frustrate it even for a day. ”