“The Hindoos are nurtured in the belief that there can be nothing disinterested or innocent in the intercourse between a man and a woman; and however Platonic the attachment might be between two persons of different sex, it would be infallibly set down to sensual love.”

DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE ROMANTIC LOVE?

My assertion that there are no cases of romantic love recorded in the Bible naturally aroused opposition, and not a few critics lifted up their voices in loud protest against such ignorant audacity.  The case for the defence was well summed up in the Rochester Post-Express:

“The ordinary reader will find many love-stories in the Scriptures, What are we to think, for instance, of this passage from the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis:  ’And Laban had two daughters:  the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel.  Leah was tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well-favored.  And Jacob loved Rachel; and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.  And Laban said, It is better that I give her to thee, than that I should give her to another man:  abide with me.  And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her,’ It may be said that after marriage Jacob’s love was not of the modern conjugal type; but certainly his pre-matrimonial passion was self-sacrificing, enduring, and hopeful enough for a mediaeval romance.  The courtship of Ruth and Boaz is a bold and pretty love-story, which details the scheme of an old widow and a young widow for the capture of a wealthy kinsman.  The Song of Solomon is, on the surface, a wonderful love-poem.  But it is needless to multiply illustrations from this source.”

A Chicago critic declared that it would be easy to show that from the moment when Adam said,

“This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.  Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and cleave unto his wife:  and they shall be one flesh”

—­from that moment unto this day “that which it pleases our author to call romantic love has been substantially one and the same thing....  Has this writer never heard of Isaac and Rebekah; of Jacob and Rachel?” A Philadelphia reviewer doubted whether I believed in my own theory because I ignored in my chapter on love among the Hebrews “the story of Jacob and Rachel and other similar instances of what deserves to be called romantic love among the Hebrews.”  Professor H.O.  Trumbull emphatically repudiates my theory in his Studies in Oriental Social Life (62-63); proceeding: