The Wedding Ring | Page 8

a bad job of marital selection, the probability
is that nothing but a funeral can relieve it. Divorce cases in court may
interest the public, but the love-letters of a married couple are poor
reading, except for those who write them. Pray God that you be
delivered from irrevocable mistake!
PARTNERS TO AVOID.
Avoid affiance with a despiser of the Christian religion, whatever else
he may have or may not have. I do not say he must needs be a religious
man, for Paul says the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife;
but marriage with a man who hates the Christian religion will insure
you a life of wretchedness. He will caricature your habit of kneeling in
prayer. He will speak depreciatingly of Christ. He will wound all the
most sacred feelings of your soul. He will put your home under the
anathema of the Lord God Almighty. In addition to the anguish with
which he will fill your life, there is great danger that he will despoil

your hope of heaven, and make your marriage relation an infinite and
eternal disaster. If you have made such engagement, your first duty is
to break it. My word may come just in time to save your soul.
HUSBANDS SELDOM REFORM.
Further, do not unite in marriage with a man of bad habits in the idea of
reforming him. If now, under the restraint of your present acquaintance,
he will not give up his bad habits, after he has won the prize you cannot
expect him to do so. You might as well plant a violet in the face of a
northeast storm with the idea of appeasing it. You might as well run a
schooner alongside of a burning ship with the idea of saving the ship.
The consequence will be, schooner and ship will be destroyed together.
The almshouse could tell the story of a hundred women who married
men to reform them. If by twenty-five years of age a man has been
grappled by intoxicants, he is under such headway that your attempt to
stop him would be very much like running up the track with a
wheelbarrow to stop a Hudson River express train. What you call an
inebriate nowadays is not a victim to wine or whiskey, but to logwood
and strychnine and nux vomica. All these poisons have kindled their
fires in his tongue and brain, and all the tears of a wife weeping cannot
extinguish the flames. Instead of marrying a man to reform him, let him
reform first, and then give him time to see whether the reform is to be
permanent. Let him understand that if he cannot do without his bad
habits for two years he must do without you forever.
MEN WEDDED TO THE WORLD.
Avoid union with one supremely selfish, or so wound up in his
occupation that he has no room for another. You occasionally find a
man who spreads himself so widely over the path of life that there is no
room for any one to walk beside him. He is not the one blade of the
scissors incomplete without the other blade, but he is a chisel made to
cut his way through life alone, or a file full of roughness, made to be
drawn across society without any affinity for other files. His disposition
is a lifelong protest against marriage. Others are so married to their
occupation or profession that the taking of any other bride is a case of

bigamy. There are men as severely tied to their literary work as was
Chatterton, whose essay was not printed because of the death of the
Lord Mayor. Chatterton made out the following account: "Lost by the
Lord Mayor's death in this essay one pound eleven shillings and
six-pence. Gained in elegies and essays five pounds and five shillings."
Then he put what he had gained by the Lord Mayor's death opposite to
what he had lost, and wrote under it: "And glad he is dead by three
pounds thirteen shillings and six-pence." When a man is as hopelessly
literary as that he ought to be a perpetual celibate; his library, his
laboratory, his books are all the companionship needed.
Indeed, some of the mightiest men this world ever saw have not
patronized matrimony. Cowper, Pope, Newton, Swift, Locke, Walpole,
Gibbon, Hume, Arbuthnot, were single. Some of these marriage would
have helped. The right kind of a wife would have cured Cowper's
gloom, and given to Newton more practicability, and been a relief to
Locke's overtasked brain. A Christian wife might have converted Hume
and Gibbon to a belief in Christianity. But Dean Swift did not deserve a
wife, from the way in which he broke the heart of Jane Waring first,
and Esther Johnson afterward, and last