The Wedding Ring | Page 7

altar. Was there a new soul incarnated, she was
there to rejoice at the nativity. Was there a sore bereavement she was
there to console. The children, rushed out at her first appearance, crying,
"Here comes Aunt Phoebe," and but for parental interference they
would have pulled her down with their caresses--for she was not very
strong, and many severe illnesses had given her enough glimpses of the
next world to make her heavenly-minded. Her table was loaded up with
Baxter's "Saints' Rest," Doddridge's "Rise and Progress," and Jay's
"Morning and Evening Exercises," and John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's
Progress," and like books, which have fitted out whole generations for
the heaven upon which they have already entered.
A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN.
"De Witt," she said to me one day, "twice in my life I have been so
overwhelmed with the love of God that I fainted away and could hardly
be resuscitated. Don't tell me there is no heaven. I have seen it twice."
If you would know how her presence would soothe an anxiety, or lift a

burden, or cheer a sorrow, or leave a blessing on every room in the
house, ask any of the Talmages. She had tarried at her early home,
taking care of an invalid father, until the bloom of life had somewhat
faded; but she could interest the young folks with some three or four
tender passages in her own history, so that we all knew that it was not
through lack of opportunity that she was not the queen of one
household, instead of being a benediction on a whole circle of
households.
At about seventy years of age she made her last visit to my house, and
when she sat in my Philadelphia church I was more embarrassed at her
presence than by all the audience, because I felt that in religion I had
got no further than the A B C, while she had learned the whole alphabet,
and for many years had finished the Y and Z. When she went out of
this life into the next, what a shout there must have been in heaven,
from the front door clear up to the back seat in the highest gallery! I
saw the other day in the village cemetery of Somerville, N.J., her
resting-place, the tombstone having on it the words which thirty years
ago she told me she would like to have inscribed there, namely: "The
Morning Cometh."
ILLUSTRIOUS SPINSTERS.
Had she a mission in the world? Certainly. As much as Caroline
Herschel, first amanuensis for her illustrious brother, and then his
assistant in astronomical calculations, and then discovering worlds for
herself, dying at ninety-eight years of age, still busy with the stars till
she sped beyond them; as much as had Florence Nightingale, the nurse
of the Crimea; or Grace Darling, the oarswoman of the Long Stone
Lighthouse; or Mary Lyon, the teacher of Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary; or Hannah More, the Christian authoress of England; or
Dorothea Dix, the angel of mercy for the insane; or Anna Etheridge,
among the wounded of Blackburn's Fort; or Margaret Breckenridge, at
Vicksburg; or Mary Shelton, distributing roses and grapes and cologne
in western hospital; or thousands of other glorious women like them,
who never took the marriage sacrament. Appreciate all this, my sister,
and it will make you deliberate before you rush out of the single state

into another, unless you are sure of betterment.
A DIFFICULT BUSINESS.
Deliberate and pray. Pray and deliberate. As I showed you in my
former sermon, a man ought to supplicate Divine guidance in such a
crisis; how much more important that you solicit it! It is easier for a
man to find an appropriate wife than for a woman to find a good
husband. This is a matter of arithmetic, as I showed in former discourse.
Statistics show that in Massachusetts and New York States women
have a majority of hundreds of thousands. Why this is we leave others
to surmise. It would seem that woman is a favorite with the Lord, and
that therefore He has made more of that kind. From the order of the
creation in paradise it is evident that woman is an improved edition of
man. But whatever be the reason for it, the fact is certain that she who
selects a husband has a smaller number of people to select from than he
who selects a wife. Therefore a woman ought to be especially careful in
her choice of life-time companionship. She cannot afford to make a
mistake. If a man err in his selection he can spend his evenings at the
club, and dull his sensibilities by tobacco-smoke; but woman has no
club-room for refuge, and would find it difficult to habituate herself to
cigars. If a woman make