The Wedding Ring | Page 3

is so full of artificialities that men are deceived as to whom they
are marrying, and no one but the Lord knows. After the dressmaker,
and the milliner, and the jeweler, and the hair-adjuster, and the
dancing-master, and the cosmetic art have completed their work, how is
an unsophisticated man to decipher the physiological hieroglyphics,
and make accurate judgment of who it is to whom he offers hand and
heart? This is what makes so many recreant husbands. They make an
honorable marriage contract, but the goods delivered are so different
from the sample by which they bargained. They were simply swindled,
and they backed out. They mistook Jezebel for Longfellow's
Evangeline, and Lucretia Borgia for Martha Washington.
Aye, as the Indian, chief boasts, of the scalps he has taken, so there are
in society to-day many coquettes who boast of the masculine hearts
they have captured. And these women, though they may live amid
richest upholstery, are not so honorable as the cyprians of the street, for
these advertise their infamy, while the former profess heaven while
they mean hell.
There is so much counterfeit womanhood abroad it is no wonder that
some cannot tell the genuine coin from the base. Do you not realize you
need divine guidance when I remind you that mistake is possible in this
important affair, and, if made, is irrevocable?

A MISTAKE IRREPARABLE.
The worst predicament possible is to be unhappily yoked together. You
see, it is impossible to break the yoke. The more you pull apart, the
more galling the yoke. The minister might bring you up again, and in
your presence read the marriage ceremony backward, might put you on
the opposite sides of the altar from where you were when you were
united, might take the ring off of the finger, might rend the
wedding-veil asunder, might tear out the marriage leaf from the family
Bible record, but all that would fail to unmarry you. It is better not to
make the mistake than to attempt its correction. But men and women
do not reveal all their characteristics till after marriage, and how are
you to avoid committing the fatal blunder? There is only one Being in
the universe who can tell you whom to choose, and that is the Lord of
Paradise. He made Eve for Adam, and Adam for Eve, and both for each
other. Adam had not a large group of women from whom to select his
wife, but it is fortunate, judging from some mistakes which she
afterward made, that it was Eve or nothing.
There is in all the world some one who was made for you, as certainly
as Eve was made for Adam. All sorts of mistakes occur because Eve
was made out of a rib from Adam's side. Nobody knows which of his
twenty-four ribs was taken for the nucleus. If you depend entirely upon
yourself in the selection of a wife, there are twenty-three possibilities to
one that you will select the wrong rib. By the fate of Ahab, whose wife
induced him to steal; by the fate of Macbeth, whose wife pushed him
into massacre; by the fate of James Ferguson, the philosopher, whose
wife entered the room while he was lecturing and willfully upset his
astronomical apparatus, so that he turned to the audience and said:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have the misfortune to be married to this
woman;" by the fate of Bulwer, the novelist, whose wife's temper was
so incompatible that he furnished her a beautiful house near London
and withdrew from her company, leaving her with the dozen dogs
whom she entertained as pets; by the fate of John Milton, who married
a termagant after he was blind, and when some one called her a rose,
the poet said: "I am no judge of flowers, but it may be so, for I feel the
thorns daily;" by the fate of an Englishman whose wife was so

determined to dance on his grave that he was buried in the sea; by the
fate of a village minister whom I knew, whose wife threw a cup of hot
tea across the table because they differed in sentiment--by all these
scenes of disquietude and domestic calamity, we implore you to be
cautious and prayerful before you enter upon the connubial state, which
decides whether a man shall have two heavens or two hells, a heaven
here and heaven forever, or a hell now and a hell hereafter.
NOBLE WIVES.
By the bliss of Pliny, whose wife, when her husband was pleading in
court, had messengers coming and going to inform her what impression
he was making; by the joy of Grotius, whose wife delivered him from
prison under the pretence of having books carried out lest they be
injurious to his