Blinding oneself is not accepting the faults; it is only pushing the consciousness of them into the unconscious, and storing up retribution and disillusionment for another day. In fact a man cannot accept that his wife has faults for long, unless he believes she will behave herself, and that in any moment of decision she will do what she, at least, believes is right. You can trust a person to do right. In rare instances you can trust a person to do right regardless of consequences. But it is nonsense to talk about trusting a person to agree to do wrong with you, which is the alternative. That isn't trust; it is a thieves' kitchen. If there is no trust, where is the harmony, and peace and quiet by one's own fireside that most men long for in marriage? So we stumble upon the truth, that love can exist only so long as there is trust that the other will do right. When this trust is broken, the fact that the risks inherent in marriage, and in one person trusting himself to another, are still as large as life, prevents the man recognising his wife as a real person any more. No-one can live with fear, any more than they can live with continual pain for ever. So in general terms the proposition comes to this; that love and righteousness go hand in hand, and when they part company love cannot last: not for long anyway, as the love for a whole person. I doubt if psychoanalysing an individual could lead to this result, because of course it is not an individual truth, but a shared truth describing as it does one person's relationship to another or others.
Of course the clergy could say, “We have always known this. It's elementary. We have always preached that God was not only righteous but loving too; and that it was inconceivable that a loving God was not also a righteous one”. But this is to miss the point. Until I attempted an analysis of the common man's desire for marriage, and the conditions necessary for a man and a woman to love one another, there was no mention of righteousness. It was a completely superfluous and unnecessary idea, and found no place in what…