I have pointed out several times before that truly conjugial love is so rare today that it is not generally known to exist. However, I have given a proof that it really does exist in the chapter on this subject [IV], and from time to time in the following ones. In any case, is there anyone who does not know that such a love exists, so far overtopping all other loves in excellence and pleasantness that these are comparatively trivial?

Experience shows that it is greater than self-love, the love of the world, even the love of one's own life. Have there not been, and are there not still, men who for a woman they long for and ask to be their bride go down on their knees, venerate her as a goddess and submit to her decisions like the humblest of servants? This shows that this love is greater than self-love. Have there not been, and are there not still, men who for a woman they long for and ask to be their bride despise wealth, even whole treasuries if they possess them, and spend it prodigally? This shows that this love is greater than the love of the world. Have there not been, and are there not still, men who for a woman they long for and ask to be their bride count their lives cheap and yearn for death, if she will not promise to fulfil their desire? Witness to this is the fact that many rivals have fought duels to the death. This shows that this love is greater than the love of one's own life. Have there not been, and are there not still, men who for a woman they long for and ask to be their bride have gone mad at being refused?

[2] From the way this love begins in many cases anyone can rationally conclude that this love by its essence reigns supreme over every other love, and that a person's soul is in it, promising itself everlasting blessings with the woman it longs for and seeks. Can anyone see, in whatever direction he goes to look, any other reason, but that he has pledged his soul and heart to one woman? For if a man in love, while in that state, were given the chance of choosing out of the whole female sex the noblest, richest and most beautiful woman, would he not spurn the chance and cling to the one he had chosen? For his heart is set on her alone.

These remarks have been made so that you may acknowledge that conjugial love of such surpassing quality exists, and it does so when one woman alone is loved out of the whole sex. Can any intellect, sufficiently trained to see the connexions between matters, fail to deduce from this that a lover, if he is constant in soul and at the inmost level in loving her, would achieve the everlasting blessings which he promised himself before he gave his agreement and promises himself when he does so? It was shown above that he actually does achieve them, if he approaches the Lord. and under His guidance lives a truly religious life. Can anyone else come into a person's life from on high, and confer inward heavenly joys on it, and pass them on to the following stages -the more so, when He also at the same time confers constant virility? The deduction that such a love does not and cannot exist, because one lacks it oneself, and so do a few others, is unsound.