The Wedding Ring | Page 4

health, she sending out her husband unobserved in one
of the bookcases; by the good fortune of Roland, in Louis' time, whose
wife translated and composed for her husband, while Secretary of the
Interior--talented, heroic, wonderful Madame Roland; by the happiness
of many a man who has made intelligent choice of one capable of being
prime counsellor and companion in brightness and in grief--pray to
Almighty God, morning, noon, and night that at the right time and in
the right way He will send you a good, honest, loving, sympathetic
wife; or if she is not sent to you, that you may be sent to her.
AVOID MATCHMAKERS.
At this point let me warn you not to let a question of this importance be
settled by the celebrated matchmakers flourishing in almost every
community. Depend upon your own judgment divinely illumined.
These brokers in matrimony are ever planning how they can unite
impecunious innocence to an heiress, or celibate woman to millionaire
or marquis, and that in many cases makes life an unhappiness. How can
any human being, who knows neither of the two parties as God knows
them, and who is ignorant of the future, give such direction as you
require at such a crisis?
Take the advice of the earthly matchmaker instead of the divine
guidance, and you may some day be led to use the words of Solomon,

whose experience in home life was as melancholy as it was
multitudinous. One day his palace with its great wide rooms and great
wide doors and great wide hall was too small for him and the loud
tongue of a woman belaboring him about some of his neglects, and he
retreated to the housetop to get relief from the lingual bombardment.
And while there he saw a poor man on one corner of the roof with a
mattress for his only furniture, and the open sky his only covering. And
Solomon envies him and cries out: "It is better to dwell in the corner of
the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house." And one
day during the rainy season the water leaked through the roof of the
palace and began to drop in a pail or pan set there to catch it. And at
one side of him all day long the water went drop! drop! drop! while on
the other side a female companion quarrelling about this, and
quarrelling about that, the acrimonious and petulant words falling on
his ear in ceaseless pelting--drop! drop! drop! and he seized his pen and
wrote: "A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious
woman are alike." If Solomon had been as prayerful at the beginning of
his life as he was at the close, how much domestic infelicity he would
have avoided!
But prayer about this will amount to nothing unless you pray soon
enough. Wait until you are fascinated and the equilibrium of your soul
is disturbed by a magnetic and exquisite presence, and then you will
answer your own prayers, and you will mistake your own infatuation
for the voice of God.
AVOID SCOFFERS.
If you have this prayerful spirit you will surely avoid all female
scoffers at the Christian religion; and there are quite a number of them
in all communities. It must be told that, though the only influence that
keeps woman from being estimated and treated as a slave--aye, as a
brute and a beast of burden--is Christianity, since where it is not
dominant she is so treated, yet there are women who will so far forget
themselves and forget their God that they will go and hear lecturers
malign Christianity and scoff at the most sacred things of the soul. A
good woman, over-persuaded by her husband, may go once to hear

such a tirade against the Christian religion, not fully knowing what she
is going to hear; but she will not go twice.
A woman, not a Christian, but a respecter of religion, said to me: "I was
persuaded by my husband to go and hear an infidel lecturer once, but
going home, I said to him: 'My dear husband, I would not go again
though my declinature should result in our divorcement forever.'" And
the woman was right. If after all that Christ and Christianity have done
for a woman, she can go again and again to hear such assaults, she is an
awful creature, and you had better not come near such a reeking lepress.
She needs to be washed, and for three weeks to be soaked in carbolic
acid, and for a whole year, fumigated, before she is fit for decent
society. While it is not demanded that a woman be a Christian before
marriage, she must have regard for the Christian religion or she is