The Wedding Ring | Page 2

delusion will last until I embark
from this planet. So you will understand, if I say in this course of
sermons something that seems severe, I am neither cynical nor
disgruntled.
NO NEED TO MARRY A FOOL.
There are in almost every farmhouse in the country, in almost every
home of the great town, conscientious women, worshipful women,
self-sacrificing women, holy women, innumerable Marys, sitting at the
feet of Christ; innumerable mothers, helping to feed Christ in the
person of His suffering disciples; a thousand capped and spectacled
grandmothers Lois, bending over Bibles whose precepts they have
followed from early girlhood; and tens of thousands of young women
that are dawning upon us from school and seminary, that are going to
bless the world with good and happy homes, that shall eclipse all their
predecessors, a fact that will be acknowledged by all men except those
who are struck through with moral decay from toe to cranium; and
more inexcusable than the Samson of the text is that man who, amid all
this unparalleled munificence of womanhood, marries a fool. But some
of you are abroad suffering from such disaster, and to halt others of you
from going over the same precipice, I cry out in the words of my text:
"Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or
among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the
uncircumcised Philistines?"
MARRIAGE NOT FOR ALL.
That marriage is the destination of the human race is a mistake that I
want to correct before I go further. There are multitudes who never will
marry, and still greater multitudes who are not fit to marry. In Great
Britain to-day there are nine hundred and forty-eight thousand more
women than men, and that, I understand, is about the ratio in America.

By mathematical and inexorable law, you see, millions of women will
never marry. The supply for matrimony is greater than the demand, the
first lesson of which is that every woman ought to prepare to take care
of herself if need be. Then there are thousands of men who have no
right to marry, because they have become so corrupt of character that
their offer of marriage is an insult to any good woman. Society will
have to be toned up and corrected on this subject, so that it shall realize
that if a woman who has sacrificed her honor is unfitted for marriage,
so is any man who has ever sacrificed his purity. What right have you,
O masculine beast! whose life has been loose, to take under your care
the spotlessness of a virgin reared in the sanctity of a respectable home?
Will a buzzard dare to court a dove?
THE FIRST STEP.
But the majority of you will marry, and have a right to marry, and as
your religious teacher I wish to say to these men, in the choice of a wife
first of all seek divine direction. About thirty-five years ago, when
Martin Farquhar Tupper, the English poet, urged men to prayer before
they decided upon matrimonial association, people laughed. And some
of them have lived to laugh on the other side of their mouth.
EMINENT BLUNDERERS.
The need of divine direction I argue from the fact that so many men,
and some of them strong and wise, have wrecked their lives at this
juncture. Witness Samson and this woman of Timnath! Witness
Socrates, pecked of the historical Xantippe! Witness Job, whose wife
had nothing to prescribe for his carbuncles but allopathic doses of
profanity! Witness Ananias, a liar, who might perhaps have been cured
by a truthful spouse, yet marrying as great a liar as himself--Sapphira!
Witness John Wesley, one of the best men that ever lived, united to one
of the most outrageous and scandalous of women, who sat in City Road
Chapel, making mouths at him while he preached! Witness the once
connubial wretchedness of John Ruskin, the great art essayist, and
Frederick W. Robertson, the great preacher! Witness a thousand
HELLS ON EARTH

kindled by unworthy wives, termagants that scold like a March
north-easter; female spendthrifts, that put their husbands into fraudulent
schemes to get money enough to meet the lavishment of domestic
expenditure; opium-using women--about four hundred thousand of
them in the United States--who will have the drug, though it should
cause the eternal damnation of the whole household; heartless and
overbearing, and namby-pamby and unreasonable women, yet
married--married perhaps to good men! These are the women who
build the low club-houses, where the husbands and sons go because
they can't stand it at home. On this sea of matrimony, where so many
have been wrecked, am I not right in advising divine pilotage?
NUMEROUS PITFALLS.
Especially is devout supplication needed, because of the fact that
society