I need not tell my readers that the machinery of our domestic life was
sadly awry; neither in separate parts, nor as a whole, did it work
properly or satisfactorily, the metal was harsh and the little wheels
could never be got to run briskly or smoothly. How could they? I think
of all the hopeless conditions on earth, that which aspires to be able
to blend human lives together, which have no more leaning towards one
another than virtue to vice, is the maddest and vainest of all.
An absence of common sympathies between two human hearts, will drift
them apart in spite of the hugest efforts that can be made to attract
them to a point of mutual interest; they who hope either by subterfuge
or unselfish zeal, to reconcile phases of human character that have
not originally sprung from a common root of harmonious unison or
contrast, are as sure to see their ambition as ingloriously defeated
as if they had revived the search for the philosopher's stone.
And yet how much estrangement there is among men and women who, if
they had never been bound together by the sacred and solemn pledges of
wedded love, are supposed still to live according to a precept of
universal charity? How indifferent they become to one another's
fortune or fate? How repulsive to them the very suggestion of entering
generously into one another's lives to share each other's pleasures
and pains?
The world is full of this occult antagonism; every day Christians, as
I have known them, look upon the happiness or sorrow of their brother
toilers as so much subtracted from their own glad or miserable
experience.
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