Love Quote by Henry Brooks Adams

Adams loads this sentence like a polite drawing-room remark with a landmine hidden in the upholstery. A man imagines himself the architect of a woman's devotion: he "calls up" her "divinity" as if it were a spirit summoned on cue after "long effort". The phrasing flatters masculine persistence and control, then snaps shut. The reward for coaxing out the sacred is not possession but subordination: he "must obey the God he summoned". What reads like praise of romantic conquest turns into a warning about the cost of craving idealization.

The subtext is less about women as mystical beings than about men as self-deceiving moderns. Adams, a historian of power and institutions, is describing a familiar political dynamic in miniature: you manufacture an authority figure to stabilize your world, then discover you've created a force with its own demands. The "divinity" here is projection made potent - the man's need for meaning, purity, or moral certainty deposited into a woman's heart until it becomes an idol that governs him.

Context matters: Adams writes from an elite late-19th-century milieu anxious about shifting social order, gender roles, and the fading certainty of old hierarchies. The line preserves Victorian essentialism (woman as vessel of the sacred) while also undercutting male supremacy. Its bite comes from the reversal: the supposed summoner becomes the servant. It is less a romance than a cautionary tale about the hazards of turning love into theology.