When he shall reach the last degree of humiliation, we shall have moral marriage.
"But if man, as in our society, tends only toward physical love, though he may clothe it with pretexts and the false forms of marriage, he will have only permissible debauchery, he will know only the same immoral life in which I fell and caused my wife to fall, a life which we call the honest life of the family.

Think what a perversion of ideas must arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked upon as something wretched and ridiculous.

The highest ideal, the best situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear and laughter in our society.

How many, how many young girls sacrifice their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they may not remain virgins,--that is, superiors! Through fear of finding themselves in that ideal state, they ruin themselves.
"But I did not understand formerly, I did not understand that the words of the Gospel, that 'he who looks upon a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery,' do not apply to the wives of others, but notably and especially to our own wives.

I did not understand this, and I thought that the honeymoon and all of my acts during that period were virtuous, and that to satisfy one's desires with his wife is an eminently chaste thing.