The Wedding Ring
by T. De Witt Talmage · English · Gutenberg #22343 · 409,223 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Wedding Ring
Author: T. De Witt Talmage
Release date: August 16, 2007 [eBook #22343]
Language: English
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* * * * *
The Wedding Ring.
A Series of Discourses for Husbands and
Wives and Those Contemplating
Matrimony.
[Illustration]
By
T. DE WITT TALMAGE.
_Reprinted from THE CHRISTIAN HERALD._
PUBLISHED BY
THE CHRISTIAN HERALD,
LOUIS KLOPSCH, Proprietor,
BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1896,
BY LOUIS KLOPSCH.
CONTENTS.
The Choice of a Wife, 5
The Choice of a Husband, 24
Clandestine Marriage, 42
Duties of Husbands to Wives, 60
Duties of Wives to Husbands, 78
Costume and Morals, 95
Husbands and Wives, 114
Matrimonial Discords, 136
Hotels Versus Home, 148
Easy Divorce, 166
Maternity, 184
The Children's Patrimony, 198
The Mother of All, 217
Sisterly Influence, 234
Trials of Housekeeping, 252
Woman Enthroned, 268
Old Folks' Visit, 286
Home, Sweet Home, 303
The Wedding Ring.
THE CHOICE OF A WIFE.
"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?"--JUDGES 14:3.
Samson, the giant, is here asking consent of his father and mother to
marriage with one whom they thought unfit for him. He was wise in
asking their counsel, but not wise in rejecting it. Captivated with
her looks, the big son wanted to marry a daughter of one of the
hostile families, a deceitful, hypocritical, whining, and saturnine
creature, who afterward made for him a world of trouble till she quit
him forever. In my text his parents forbade the banns, practically
saying: "When there are so many honest and beautiful maidens of your
own country, are you so hard put to for a lifetime partner that you
propose conjugality with this foreign flirt? Is there such a dearth of
lilies in our Israelitish gardens that you must wear on your heart a
Philistine thistle? Do you take a crabapple because there are no
pomegranates? 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?"
BEAUTIFUL JEWESSES.
Excuseless was he for such a choice in a land and amid a race
celebrated for female loveliness and moral worth, a land and a race of
which self-denying Abigail, and heroic Deborah, and dazzling Miriam,
and pious Esther, and glorious Ruth, and Mary, who hugged to her heart
the blessed Lord, were only magnificent specimens. The midnight folded
in their hair, the lakes of liquid beauty in their eye, the
gracefulness of spring morning in their posture and gait, were only
typical of the greater brilliance and glory of their soul. Likewise
excuseless is any man in our time who makes lifelong alliance with any
one who, because of her disposition, or heredity, or habits, or
intellectual vanity, or _moral twistification_, may be said to be of
the Philistines.
MODERN FEMALE LOVELINESS.
The world never owned such opulence of womanly character or such
splendor of womanly manners or multitudinous instances of wifely,
motherly, daughterly, sisterly devotion, as it owns to-day. I have
not words to express my admiration for good womanhood. Woman is not
only man's equal, but in affectional and religious nature, which is
the best part of us, she is seventy-five per cent his superior. Yea,
during the last twenty years, through the increased opportunity opened
for female education, the women of the country are better educated
than the majority of men; and if they continue to advance in mentality
at the present ratio, before long the majority of men will have
difficulty in finding in the opposite sex enough ignorance to make
appropriate consort. If I am under a delusion as to the abundance of
good womanhood abroad, consequent upon my surroundings since the hour
I entered this life until now, I hope the 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 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 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 a bad woman and unworthy of being your companion in
a life charged with such stupendous solemnity and vicissitudes.
TWO ESSENTIAL QUALITIES.
What you want, O man! in a wife, is not a butterfly of the sunshine,
not a giggling nonentity, not a painted doll, not a gossiping
gadabout, not a mixture of artificialities which leave you in doubt as
to where the humbug ends and the woman begins, but an earnest soul,
one that cannot only laugh when you laugh, but weep when you weep.
There will be wide, deep graves in your path of life, and you will
both want steadying when you come to the verge of them, I tell you!
When your fortune fails you will want some one to talk of treasures in
heaven, and not charge upon you with a bitter, "I told you so." As
far as I can analyze it, _sincerity and earnestness_ are the
foundation of all worthy wifehood. Get that, and you get all. Fail to
get that, and you get nothing but what you will wish you never had
got.
BEAUTY A BENEDICTION.
Don't make the mistake that the man of the text made in letting his
eye settle the question in which coolest judgment directed by divine
wisdom are all-important. He who has no reason for his wifely choice
except a pretty face is like a man who should buy a farm because of
the dahlias in the front dooryard. Beauty is a talent, and when God
gives it He intends it as a benediction upon a woman's face. When the
good _Princess of Wales_ dismounted from the railtrain last summer,
and I saw her radiant face, I could understand what they told me the
day before, that, when at the great military hospital where are now
the wounded and the sick from the Egyptian and other wars, the
Princess passed through, all the sick were cheered at her coming, and
those who could be roused neither by doctor nor nurse from their
stupor, would get up on their elbows to look at her, and wan and
wasted lips prayed an audible prayer: "God bless the Princess of
Wales! Doesn't she look beautiful?"
But how uncertain is the tarrying of beauty in a human countenance!
Explosion of a kerosene lamp turns it into scarification, and a
scoundrel with one dash of vitriol may dispel it, or Time will drive
his chariot wheels across that bright face, cutting it up in deep ruts
and gullies. But there is an eternal beauty on the face of some women,
whom a rough and ungallant world may criticise as homely; and though
their features may contradict all the laws of Lavater on physiognomy,
yet they have graces of soul that will keep them attractive for time
and glorious through all eternity.
There are two or three circumstances in which the plainest wife is a
queen of beauty to her husband, whatever her stature or profile. By
financial panic or betrayal of business partner, the man goes down,
and returning to his home that evening he says: "_I am ruined_; I am
in disgrace forever; I care not whether I live or die." It is an
agitated story he is telling in the household that winter night. He
says: "The furniture must go, the house must go, the social position
must go," and from being sought for obsequiously they must be
cold-shouldered everywhere. After he ceases talking, and the wife has
heard all in silence, she says: "Is that all? Why, you had nothing
when I married you, and you have only come back to where you started.
If you think that my happiness and that of the children depend on
these trappings, you do not know me, though we have lived together
thirty years. God is not dead, and the National Bank of Heaven has not
suspended payment, and if you don't mind, I don't care a cent. What
little we need of food and raiment the rest of our lives we can get,
and I don't propose to sit down and mope and groan. Mary, hand me that
darning-needle. I declare! I have forgotten to set the rising for
those cakes!" And while she is busy at it he hears her humming
Newton's old hymn, "To-Morrow:"
"It can bring with it nothing
But He will bear us through;
Who gives the lilies clothing
Will clothe His people too;
Beneath the spreading heavens
No creature but is fed;
And He who feeds the ravens
Will give His children bread.
"Though vine nor fig-tree either
Their wonted fruit should bear,
Though all the fields should wither
Nor flocks nor herds be there;
Yet God the same abiding,
His praise shall tune my voice;
For while in Him confiding
I cannot but rejoice."
The husband looks up in amazement, and says: "Well, well, you are the
greatest woman I ever saw. I thought you would faint dead away when I
told you." And as he looks at her, all the glories of physiognomy in
the court of Louis XV. on the modern fashion plates are tame as
compared with the superhuman splendors of that woman's face. Joan of
Arc, Mary Antoinette, and La Belle Hamilton, the enchantment of the
court of Charles II., are nowhere.
A WIFE'S DEATH.
There is another time when the plainest wife is a queen of beauty to
her husband. She has done the work of life. She has reared her
children for God and heaven, and though some of them may be a little
wild they will yet come back, for God has promised. She is dying, and
her husband stands by. They think over all the years of their
companionship, the weddings and the burials, the ups and the downs,
the successes and the failures. They talk over the goodness of God and
His faithfulness to children's children. She has no fear about going.
The Lord has sustained her so many years she would not dare to
distrust Him now. The lips of both of them tremble as they say
good-bye and encourage each other about an early meeting in a better
world. The breath is feebler and feebler, and stops. Are you sure of
it? Just hold that mirror at the mouth, and see if there is any vapor
gathering on the surface. Gone! As one of the neighbors takes the old
man by the arm and gently says: "Come, you had better go into the next
room and rest," he says: "Wait a moment; I must take one more look at
that face and at those hands!" Beautiful! Beautiful!
My friends, I hope you do not call that death. That is an autumnal
sunset. That is a crystalline river pouring into a crystal sea. That
is the solo of human life overpowered by hallelujah chorus. That is a
queen's coronation. That is heaven. That is the way my father stood at
eighty-two, seeing my mother depart at seventy-nine. Perhaps so your
father and mother went. I wonder if we shall die as well?
THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND.
"The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the
house of her husband."--RUTH 1:9.
This was the prayer of pious Naomi for Ruth and Orpah, and is an
appropriate prayer now in behalf of unmarried womanhood. Naomi, the
good old soul, knew that the devil would take their cases in hand if
God did not, so she prays: "The Lord grant you that ye may find rest,
each of you in the house of her husband."
In this series of sermons on "The Wedding Ring" I last Sabbath gave
prayerful and Christian advice to men in regard to the selection of a
wife, and to-day I give the same prayerful and Christian advice to
women in regard to the selection of a husband, but in all these
sermons saying much that I hope will be appropriate for all ages and
all classes.
VOLUNTARY CELIBACY.
I applaud the celibacy of a multitude of women who, rather than make
unfit selection, have made none at all. It has not been a lack of
opportunity for marital contract on their part, but their own culture
and refinement, and their exalted idea as to what a husband ought to
be, have caused their declinature. They have seen so many women marry
imbeciles, or ruffians, or incipient sots, or life-time incapables, or
magnificent nothings, or men who before marriage were angelic and
afterward diabolic, that they have been alarmed and stood back. They
saw so many boats go into the maelstrom that they steered into other
waters. Better for a woman to live alone, though she live a thousand
years, than to be annexed to one of these masculine failures with
which society is surfeited. The patron saint of almost every family
circle is some such unmarried woman, and among all the families of
cousins she moves around, and her coming in each house is the morning,
and her going away is the night.
A BENEFICENT SPINSTERHOOD.
In my large circle of kindred, perhaps twenty families in all, it was
an Aunt Phoebe. Paul gave a letter of introduction to one whom he
calls "Phoebe, our sister," as she went up from Cenchrea to Rome,
commending her for her kindness and Christian service, and imploring
for her all courtesies. I think Aunt Phoebe was named after her. Was
there a sickness in any of the households, she was there ready to sit
up and count out the drops of medicine. Was there a marriage, she
helped deck the bride for the 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 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 of all "Vanessa." The great wit
of the day, he was outwitted by his own cruelties.
PREDESTINATION IN MARRIAGE.
Amid so many possibilities of fatal mistake, am I not right in urging
you to seek the unerring wisdom of God, and before you are infatuated?
Because most marriages are fit to be made convinces us that they are
divinely arranged. Almost every cradle has an affinity toward some
other cradle. They may be on the opposite sides of the earth, but one
child gets out of this cradle, and another child gets out of that
cradle, and with their first steps they start for each other. They may
diverge from the straight path, going toward the North, or South, or
East, or West. They may fall down, but the two rise facing each other.
They are approaching all through infancy. The one all through the
years of boyhood is going to meet the one who is coming through all
the years of girlhood to meet him. The decision of parents as to what
is best concerning them, and the changes of fortune, may for a time
seem to arrest
THE TWO JOURNEYS;
but on they go. They may never have seen each other. But the two
pilgrims who started at the two cradles are nearing. After eighteen,
twenty, or thirty years, the two come within sight. At the first
glance they may feel a dislike, and they may slacken their step; yet
something that the world calls fate, and that religion calls
Providence, urges them on and on. They must meet. They come near
enough to join hands in social acquaintance, after awhile to join
hands in friendship, after awhile to join hearts. The delegate from
the one cradle comes up the east aisle of the church with her father.
The delegate from the other cradle comes up the west aisle of the
church. The two long journeys end at the snow-drift of the bridal
veil. The two chains made out of many years are forged together by the
golden link which the groom puts upon the third finger of the left
hand. One on earth, may they be one in heaven!
But there are so many exceptions to the general rule of natural
affinity that only those are safe who pray for a heavenly hand to lead
them. Because they depended on themselves and not on God there are
thousands of women every year going to the slaughter. In India women
leap on the funeral pyre of a dead husband. We have a worse spectacle
than that in America--women innumerable leaping on the funeral pyre of
a living husband.
THE ADVERTISING BRUTE.
Avoid all proposed alliances through newspaper advertisements. Many
women, just for fun, have answered such advertisements, and have been
led on from step to step to catastrophe infinite. All the men who
write such advertisements are villains and lepers--all, without a
single exception. All! All! Do you answer them just for fun? I will
tell you a safer and healthier fun. Thrust your hand through the cage
at a menagerie, and stroke the back of a cobra from the East Indies.
Put your head in the mouth of a Numidian lion, to see if he will bite.
Take a glassful of Paris green mixed with some delightful henbane.
These are safer and healthier fun than answering newspaper
advertisements for a wife.
MARRY INDEPENDENT MEN.
My advice is: Marry a man who is a fortune in himself. Houses, lands,
and large inheritance are well enough, but the wheel of fortune turns
so rapidly that through some investment all these in a few years may
be gone. There are some things, however, that are a perpetual
fortune--good manners, geniality of soul, kindness, intelligence,
sympathy, courage, perseverance, industry, and whole-heartedness.
Marry such a one and you have married a fortune, whether he have an
income now of $50,000 a year or an income of $1000. A bank is secure
according to its capital stock, and not to be judged by the deposits
for a day or a week. A man is rich according to his sterling
qualities, and not according to the mutability of circumstances, which
may leave with him a large amount of resources to-day and withdraw
them to-morrow. If a man is worth nothing but money he is poor indeed.
If a man have upright character he is rich. Property may come and go,
he is independent of the markets. Nothing can buy him out, nothing can
sell him out. He may have more money one year than another, but his
better fortunes never vacillate.
AVOID PERFECT MEN.
Yet do not expect to find a perfect man. If you find one without any
faults, incapable of mistakes, never having guessed wrongly, his
patience never having been perturbed, immaculate in speech, in temper,
in habits, do not marry him. Why? Because you would enact a swindle.
What would you do with a perfect man who are not perfect yourself? And
how dare you hitch your imperfection fast on such supernatural
excellence? What a companion you would make for an angel! In other
words, there are no perfect men. There never was but one perfect pair,
and they slipped down the banks of paradise together. We occasionally
find a man who says he never sins. _We know he lies_ when he says it.
We have had financial dealings with two or three perfect men, and they
cheated us wofully. Do not, therefore, look for an immaculate husband,
for you will not find him.
PLENTY OF GOOD HUSBANDS.
But do not become cynical on this subject. Society has a great
multitude of grand men who know how to make home happy. When they come
to be husbands they evince a nobility of nature and a self-sacrificing
spirit that surprise even the wife. These are the men who cheerfully
sit in dark and dirty business offices, ten feet by twelve, in summer
time hard at work while the wives and daughters are off at Saratoga,
Mount Desert, or the White Sulphur. These are the men who, never
having had much education themselves, have their sons at Yale, and
Harvard, and Virginia University. These are the men who work
themselves to death by fifty years of age, and go out to Greenwood
leaving large estate and generous life-insurance provision for their
families.
There are husbands and fathers here by the hundreds who would die for
their households. If outlawry should ever become dominant in our
cities they would stand in their doorway, and with their own arm would
cleave down, one by one, fifty invaders face to face, foot to foot,
and every stroke a demolition. This is what makes an army in defence
in a country fight more desperately than an army of conquest. It is
not so much the abstract sentiment of a flag as it is wife, and
children, and home that turns enthusiasm into a fury. The world has
such men by the million, and the homunculi that infest all our
communities must not hinder women from appreciating the glory of true
manhood.
FIDELITY IN ADVERSITY.
I was reading of a bridal reception. The young man had brought home
the choice of his heart in her elaborate and exquisite apparel. As she
stood in the gay drawing-room, and amid the gay group, the young man's
eyes filled with tears of joy as he thought that she was his. Years
passed by, and they stood at the same parlor on another festal
occasion. She wore the same dress, for business had not opened as
brightly to the young husband as he expected, and he had never been
able to purchase for her another dress. Her face was not as bright and
smooth as it had been years before, and a careworn look had made its
signature on her countenance. As the husband looked at her he saw the
difference between this occasion and the former, and he went over to
where she sat, and said: "You remember the time when we were here
before. You have the same dress on. Circumstances have somewhat
changed, but you look to me far more beautiful than you did then."
There is such a thing as conjugal fidelity, and many of you know it in
your own homes.
But, after all the good advice we may give you, we come back to the
golden pillar from which we started, the tremendous truth that no one
but God can guide you in safety about this matter that may decide your
happiness for two worlds, this and the next. So, my sister, I put your
case where Naomi put that of Ruth and Orpah when she said: "The Lord
grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her
husband."
THE WEDDING.
I imagine the hour for which you pledged your troth has arrived. There
is much merry-making among your young friends, but there is an
undertone of sadness in all the house. Your choice may have been the
gladdest and the best, and the joy of the whole round of relatives,
but when a young eaglet is about to leave the old nest, and is
preparing to put out into sunshine and storm for itself, it feels its
wings tremble somewhat. So she has a good cry before leaving home, and
at the marriage father and mother always cry, or feel like it. If you
think it is easy to give up a daughter in marriage, though it be with
brightest prospects, you will think differently when the day comes. To
have all along watched her from infancy to girlhood, and from girlhood
to womanhood, studious of her welfare, her slightest illness an
anxiety, and her presence in your home an ever-increasing joy, and
then have her go away to some other home--aye, all the redolence of
orange-blossoms, and all the chime of marriage bells, and all the
rolling of wedding march in full diapason, and all the hilarious
congratulations of your friends cannot make you forget that you are
suffering a loss irreparable. But you know it is all right, and you
have a remembrance of an embarkation just like it twenty-five or
thirty years ago, in which you were one of the parties; and,
suppressing as far as possible your sadness, you say, "Good-bye."
VISIT THE OLD HOME.
I hope that you, the departing daughter, will not forget to write
often home; for, whatever betide you, the old folks will never lose
their interest in your welfare. Make visits to them also as often, and
stay as long as you can, for there will be changes at the old place
after awhile. Every time you go you will find more gray hairs on
father's head and more wrinkles on mother's brow; and after awhile you
will notice that the elastic step has become decrepitude. And some day
one of the two pillars of your early home will fall, and after awhile
the other pillar of that home will fall, and it will be a comfort to
yourself if, when they are gone, you can feel that while you are
faithful in your new home you never forget your old home, and the
first friends you ever had, and those to whom you are more indebted
than you ever can be to any one else except to God--I mean your father
and mother. Alexander Pope put it in effective rhythm when he said:
"Me let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age;
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky."
And now I commend all this precious and splendid young womanhood
before me to-day to the God "who setteth the solitary in families."
CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE.
"Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.
But he knoweth not that the dead are there."--PROVERBS 9:17, 18.
The Garden of Eden was a great orchard of fruit-bearing trees, bushels
and bushels of round, ripe, glorious fruit; but the horticulturist and
his wife having it in charge hankered for one special tree, simply
because it was forbidden, starting a bad streak in human nature, so
that children will now sometimes do something simply because they are
forbidden to do it. This
KINK IN THE HUMAN RACE
is not easily unsnarled. Tell a company that they may look into any
twenty rooms of a large house except one, and their chief desire is to
see that one, though all the others were picture-galleries and that a
garret. If there were in a region of mineral springs twenty fountains,
but the proprietor had fenced in one well against the public, the one
fenced in would be the chief temptation to the visitors, and they
would rather taste of that than of the other nineteen. Solomon
recognized this principle in the text, and also the disaster that
follows forbidden conduct, when he said: "Stolen waters are sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the
dead are there."
In this course of sermons on "The Wedding Ring," I this morning aim a
point-blank shot at "Clandestine Marriages and Escapades."
Yonder comes up through the narrows of New York harbor a ship having
all the evidence of tempestuous passage: salt water-mark reaching to
the top of the smoke-stack; mainmast, foremast, mizzenmast twisted
off; bulwarks knocked in; lifeboats off the davit; jib-sheets and
lee-bowlines missing; captain's bridge demolished; main shaft broken;
all the pumps working to keep from sinking before they can get to
wharfage. That ship is the institution of Christian marriage, launched
by the Lord grandly from the banks of the Euphrates, and floating out
on the seas for the admiration and happiness of all nations. But
free-loveism struck it from one side, and Mormonism struck it from
another side, and hurricanes of libertinism have struck it on all
sides, until the old ship needs repairs in every plank, and beam, and
sail, and bolt, and clamp, and transom, and stanchion. In other words,
the notions of modern society must be reconstructed on the subject of
the marriage institution. And when we have got it back somewhere near
what it was when God built it in Paradise, the earth will be far on
toward resumption of Paradisaical conditions.
DEPLORABLE LAXITY.
Do you ask what is the need of a course of sermons on this subject?
The man or woman who asks this question is either ignorant or guilty.
In New England, which has been considered by many the most moral part
of the United States, there are two thousand divorces per year. And in
Massachusetts, the headquarters of steady habits, there is one divorce
to every fourteen marriages. The State of Maine, considered by many
almost frigid in proprieties, has in one year four hundred and
seventy-eight divorces. In Vermont _swapping wives_ is not a rare
transaction. In Connecticut there are women who boast that they have
four or five times been divorced. Moreover, our boasted Protestantism
is, on this subject, more lax than Roman Catholicism. Roman
Catholicism admits of no divorce except for the reason that Christ
admitted as a lawful reason. But Protestantism is admitting anything
and everything, and the larger the proportion of Protestants in any
part of the country, the larger the ratio of divorce. Do you not then
think that Protestantism needs some toning up on this subject?
GROWING POPULARITY.
Aye, when you realize that the sacred and divine institution is being
caricatured and defamed by clandestine marriages and escapades all
over the land, does there not seem a call for such discussion? Hardly
a morning or evening paper comes into your possession without
reporting them, and there are fifty of these occurrences where one is
reported, because it is the interest of all parties to hush them up.
The victims are, all hours of the night, climbing down ladders or
crossing over from State to State, that they may reach laws of greater
laxity, holding reception six months after marriage to let the public
know for the first time that a half year before they were united in
wedlock. Ministers of religion, and justices of the peace, and mayors
of cities, willingly joining in marriage runaways from other States
and neighborhoods; the coach-box and the back seat of the princely
landau in flirtation; telegrams flashing across the country for the
arrest of absconded school misses, who started off with arm full of
books, and taking rail trains to meet their affianced--in the
snow-drifts of the great storm that has recently passed over the
country some of them, I read, have perished--thousands of people in a
marriage whose banns have never been published; precipitated
conjugality; bigamy triumphant; marriage a joke; society blotched all
over with a putrefaction on this subject which no one but the Almighty
God can arrest.
We admit that clandestinity and escapade are sometimes authorized and
made right by parental tyranny or domestic serfdom. There have been
exceptional cases where parents have had a monomania in regard to
their sons and daughters, demanding their celibacy or forbidding
relations every way right. Through absurd family ambition parents have
sometimes demanded qualifications and equipment of fortune
unreasonable to expect or simply impossible. Children are not expected
to marry to please their parents, but to please themselves. Given good
morals, means of a livelihood, appropriate age and quality of social
position, and no parent has a right to prohibit a union that seems
deliberate and a matter of the heart. Rev. Philip Henry, eminent for
piety and good sense, used to say to his children: "Please God and
please yourselves, and you shall never displease me."
A MATRIMONIAL TRAGEDY.
During our Civil War a marriage was about to be celebrated at
Charleston, S.C., between Lieutenant de Rochelle and Miss Anna, the
daughter of ex-Governor Pickens. As the ceremony was about to be
solemnized a shell broke through the roof and wounded nine of the
guests, and the bride fell dying, and, wrapped in her white wedding
robe, her betrothed kneeling at her side, in two hours she expired.
And there has been many as bright a union of hearts as that proposed
that the bombshell of outrageous parental indignation has wounded and
scattered and slain.
If the hand offered in marriage be blotched of intemperance; if the
life of the marital candidate has been debauched; if he has no visible
means of support, and poverty and abandonment seem only a little way
ahead; if the twain seem entirely unmatched in disposition, protest
and forbid, and re-enforce your opinion by that of others, and put all
lawful obstacles in the way; but do not join that company of parents
who have ruined their children by a plutocracy of domestic crankiness
which has caused more than one elopement. I know of a few cases where
marriage has been under the red-hot anathema of parents and all the
neighbors, but God approved, and the homes established have been
beautiful and positively Edenic.
But while we have admitted there are real cases of justifiable
rebellion, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred--yea, in nine hundred
and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, these unlicensed departures
and decampments by moonlight are ruin, temporal and eternal. It is
safer for a woman to jump off the docks of the East River and depend
on being able to swim to the other shore, or get picked up by a
ferry-boat. The possibilities are that she may be rescued, but the
probability is that she will not. Read the story of the escapades in
the newspapers for the last ten years, and find me a half dozen that
do not mean poverty, disgrace, abandonment, police court, divorce,
death, and hell. "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret
is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there." Satan
presides over the escapade. He introduces the two parties to each
other. He gets them to pledge their troth. He appoints where they
shall meet. He shows them where they can find officiating minister or
squire. He points out to them the ticket office for the rail train. He
puts them aboard, and when they are going at forty miles the hour he
jumps off and leaves them in the lurch; for, while Satan has a genius
in getting people into trouble, he has no genius for getting people
out. He induced Jonah to take ship for Tarshish when God told him to
go to Nineveh, but provided for the recreant prophet no better
landing-place than the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
THE DIME NOVEL.
The modern novel is responsible for many of these abscondings. Do you
think that young women would sit up half a night reading novels in
which the hero and heroine get acquainted in the usual way, and carry
on their increased friendliness until, with the consent of parents,
the day of marriage is appointed, and amid the surrounding group of
kindred the vows are taken? Oh, no! There must be flight, and pursuit,
and narrow escape, and drawn dagger, all ending in sunshine, and
parental forgiveness, and bliss unalloyed and gorgeous. In many of the
cases of escapade the idea was implanted in the hot brain of the woman
by a cheap novel, ten cents' worth of unadulterated perdition.
THE SCHEME OF BAD MEN.
These evasions of the ordinary modes of marriage are to be deplored
for the reason that nearly all of them are proposed by bad men. If the
man behave well he has a character to which he can refer, and he can
say: "If you want to inquire about me there is a list of names of
people in the town or neighborhood where I live." No; the heroes of
escapades are nearly all either bigamists, or libertines, or
drunkards, or defrauders, or first-class scoundrels of some sort. They
have no character to lose. They may be dressed in the height of
fashion, may be cologned, and pomatumed, and padded, and
diamond-ringed, and flamboyant-cravatted, until they bewitch the eye
and intoxicate the olfactories; but they are double-distilled extracts
of villainy, moral dirt and blasphemy. Beware of them. "Stolen waters
are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not
that the dead are there."
SOCIAL DEGRADATION.
Fugitive marriage is to be deplored because it almost always implies
woman's descent from a higher social plane to a lower. If the man was
not of a higher plane, or the marriage on an equality, there would be
no objections, and hence no inducement to clandestinity. In almost all
cases it means the lowering of womanhood. Observe this law: a man
marrying a woman beneath him in society may raise her to any eminence
that he himself may reach; but if a woman marry a man beneath her in
society she always goes down to his level. That is a law inexorable,
and there are no exceptions. Is any woman so high up that she can
afford to plot for her own debasement? There is not a State in the
American Union that has not for the last twenty years furnished an
instance of the sudden departure of some intelligent woman from an
affluent home to spend her life with some one who can make five
dollars a day, provided he keeps very busy. Well, many a man has
lived on five dollars a day and been happy, but he undertakes a big
contract when with five dollars a day he attempts to support some one
who has lived in a home that cost twenty thousand per annum. This has
been about the history of most of such conjunctions of simplicity and
extravagance, the marriage of
OX AND EAGLE.
The first year they get on tolerably well, for it is odd and romantic,
and assisted by applause of people who admire outlawry. The second
year the couple settle down into complete dislike of each other. The
third year they separate and seek for divorce, or, as is more
probable, the man becomes a drunkard, and the woman a blackened waif
of the street. "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is
pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there."
These truant marriages are also to be deplored because in most
instances they are executed in defiance of parental wisdom and
kindness. Most parents are anxious for the best welfare of a child. If
they make vehement and determined opposition, it is largely because it
is a match unfit to be made, and they can see for their daughter
nothing but wretchedness in that direction. They have keener and wiser
appreciation, for instance, of the certain domestic demolition that
comes from alcoholism in a young man. They realize what an idiot a
woman is who marries a man who has not brains or industry enough to
earn a livelihood for a family. No bureau of statistics can tell us
the number of women who, after marriage, have to support themselves
and their husbands. If the husband becomes invalid, it is a beautiful
thing to see a wife uncomplainingly, by needle, or pen, or yard-stick,
or washing-machine, support the home. But these great, lazy masculine
louts that stand around with hands in their pockets, allowing the wife
with her weak arm to fight the battle of bread, need to be
regurgitated from society.
REVERSED RELATIONS.
There are innumerable instances in these cities where the wife pays
the rent, and meets all the family expenses, and furnishes the tobacco
and the beer for the lord of the household. No wonder parents put on
all the brakes to stop such a train of disaster. They have too often
seen the gold ring put on the finger at the altar turning out to be
the iron link of a chain of domestic servitude. What a farce it is for
a man who cannot support himself, and not worth a cent in the world,
to take a ring which he purchased by money stolen from his
grandmother's cupboard, and put it on the finger of the bride, saying:
"With this ring I thee wed, and with all my worldly goods I thee
endow."
It is amazing to see how some women will marry men knowing nothing
about them. No merchant would sell a hundred dollars' worth of goods
on credit without knowing whether the customer was worthy of being
trusted. No man or woman would buy a house with encumbrances of
mortgages, and liens, and judgments against it uncancelled; and yet
there is not an hour of the day or night for the last ten years there
have not been women by hasty marriage entrusting their earthly
happiness to men about whose honesty they know nothing, or who are
encumbered with liens, and judgments, and first mortgages, and second
mortgages, and third mortgages of evil habits. No wonder that in such
circumstances parents in conjugating the verb in question pass from
the subjunctive mood to the indicative, and from the indicative to the
imperative. In nearly all the cases of escapade that you will hear of
the rest of your lives there will be a headlong leap over the barriers
of parental common sense and forethought. "Stolen waters are sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the
dead are there."
INVOLVES DECEPTION.
We also deplore these fraudulent espousals and this sneaking exchange
of single life for married life because it is deception, and that is a
corroding and damning vice. You must deceive your kindred, you must
deceive society, you must deceive all but God, and Him you cannot
deceive. Deception does not injure others so much as it injures
ourselves. Marriage is too important a crisis in one's life to be
decided by sleight of hand, or a sort of jugglery which says: "Presto,
change! Now you see her, and now you don't."
Better to wait for years for circumstances to improve. Time may remove
all obstacles. The candidate for marital preferences may change his
habits, or get into some trade or business that will support a home,
or the inexorable father and mother may be promoted to celestial
citizenship. At the right time have the day appointed. Stand at the
end of the best room in the house with joined hands, and minister of
religion before you to challenge the world that "if they know of any
reason why these two persons shall not be united, they state it now or
forever hold their peace," and then start out with the good wishes of
all the neighbors and the halo of the Divine sanction. When you can go
out of harbor at noon with all flags flying, do not try to run a
blockade at midnight.
In view of all this, I charge you to break up clandestine
correspondence if you are engaged in it, and have no more clandestine
meetings, either at the ferry, or on the street, or at the house of
mutual friends, or at the corner of the woods. Do not have letters
come for you to the post-office under assumed address. Have no
correspondence that makes you uneasy lest some one by mistake open
your letters. Do not employ terms of endearment at the beginning and
close of letters unless you have a right to use them. That young lady
is on the edge of danger who dares not allow her mother to see her
letters.
CONFIDE IN PARENTS.
If you have sensible parents take them into your confidence in all the
affairs of the heart. They will give you more good advice in one hour
than you can get from all the world beside in five years. They have
toiled for you so long, and prayed for you so much, they have your
best interests at heart. At the same time let parents review their
opposition to a proposed marital alliance, and see if their opposition
is founded on a genuine wish for the child's welfare, or on some whim,
or notion, or prejudice, or selfishness, fighting a natural law and
trying to make Niagara run up stream. William Pitt, the Prime Minister
of England in the reign of George III., was always saying wise things.
One day Sir Walter Farquhar called on him in great perturbation. Mr.
Pitt inquired what was the matter, and Sir Walter told him that his
daughter was about to be married to one not worthy of her rank. Mr.
Pitt said: "Is the young man of respectable family?" "Yes." "Is he
respectable in himself?" "Yes." "Has he an estimable character?"
"Yes." "Why, then, my dear Sir Walter, make no opposition." The advice
was taken, and a happy married life ensued. Let ministers and officers
of the law decline officiating at clandestine marriages. When they are
asked to date a marriage certificate back, as we all are asked, let
them peremptorily decline to say that the ceremony was in November
instead of January, or decline to leave the date blank, lest others
fill out the record erroneously. Let a law be passed in all our
States, as it has already been in some of the States, making a license
from officers of the law necessary before we can unite couples, and
then make it necessary to publish beforehand in the newspapers, as it
used to be published in the New England churches, so that if there be
lawful objection it may be presented, not swinging the buoy on the
rocks after the ship has struck and gone to pieces.
And here it might be well for me to take all the romance out of an
escapade by quoting a dozen lines of Robert Pollock, the great Scotch
poet, where he describes the crazed victim of one of these escapades:
"... Yet had she many days
Of sorrow in the world, but never wept.
She lived on alms, and carried in her hand
Some withered stalks she gathered in the spring.
When any asked the cause she smiled, and said
They were her sisters, and would come and watch
Her grave when she was dead. She never spoke
Of her deceiver, father, mother, home,
Or child, or heaven, or hell, or God; but still
In lonely places walked, and ever gazed
Upon the withered stalks, and talked to them;
Till, wasted to the shadow of her youth,
With woe too wide to see beyond, she died."
UNDER THE LIGHT.
But now I turn on this subject an intenser light. We have fifteen
hundred lights in this church, and when by electric touch they are
kindled in the evening service it is almost startling. But this whole
subject of "Clandestine Marriages and Escapades" I put under a more
intense light than that. The headlight of a locomotive is terrible if
you stand near enough to catch the full glare of it. As it sweeps
around the "Horseshoe Curve" of the Alleghanies or along the edges of
the Sierra Nevadas, how far ahead, and how deep down, and how high up
it flashes, and there is instantaneous revelation of mountain peak and
wild beasts hieing themselves to their caverns and cascades a thousand
feet tall, or clinging in white terror to the precipices! But more
intense, more far-reaching, more sudden, swifter and more tremendous
is the headlight of an advancing Judgment Day, under which all the
most hidden affairs of life shall come to discovery and arraignment. I
quote an overwhelming passage of Scripture, in which I put the whole
emphasis on the word "secret." "God shall bring every work into
judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or evil."
What a time that will be in which the cover shall be lifted from every
home and from every heart. The iniquity may have been so sly that it
escaped all human detection, but it will be as well known on that day
as the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, unless for Christ's sake it has
been forgiven. All the fingers of universal condemnation will be
pointed at it. The archangel of wrath will stand there with uplifted
thunderbolt ready to strike it. The squeamishness and prudery of
earthly society, which hardly allowed some sins to be mentioned on
earth, are past, and the man who was unclean and the woman who was
impure will, under a light brighter than a thousand noonday suns,
stand with the whole story written on scalp, and forehead, and cheek,
and hands, and feet; the whole resurrection body aflame and dripping
with fiery disclosures, ten thousand sepulchral and celestial and
infernal voices crying, "Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!"
All marital intrigues and all secret iniquities will be published, as
though all the trumpets spoke them, and all the lightnings capitalized
them, and all the earthquakes rumbled them. Oh, man, recreant to thy
marriage vow! Oh, woman, in sinful collusion! What, then, will become
of thy poor soul? The tumbling Alps, and Pyrenees, and Mount
Washingtons cannot hide thee from the consequences of thy secret sins.
Better repent of them now, so that they cannot be brought against
thee. For the chief of sinners there is pardon, if you ask it in time.
But I leave you to guess what chance there will be for those who on
earth lived in clandestine relations, when on that day the very Christ
who had such high appreciation of the marriage relation that He
compared it to His own relation with the Church, shall appear at the
door of the great hall of the Last Assize, and all the multitudes of
earth, and hell, and heaven shall rise up and cry out from the three
galleries: "Behold, the bridegroom cometh!"
DUTIES OF HUSBANDS TO WIVES.
"And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at eventide: and he
lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were
coming."--GENESIS 24:63.
A bridal pageant on the back of dromedaries! The camel is called the
ship of the desert. Its swinging motion in the distance is suggestive
of a vessel rising and falling with the billows. Though awkward, how
imposing these creatures as they move along, whether in ancient or
modern times, sometimes carrying four hundred or four thousand
travelers from Bagdad to Aleppo, or from Bassora to Damascus! In my
text comes a caravan. We notice the noiseless step of the broad foot,
the velocity of motion, the gay caparison of saddle, and girth, and
awning, sheltering the riders from the sun, and the hilarity of the
mounted passengers, and we cry out: "Who are they?" Well, Isaac has
been praying for a wife, and it is time he had one, for he is forty
years of age; and his servant, directed by the Lord, has made a
selection of Rebekah; and, with her companions and maidens, she is on
her way to her new home, carrying with her the blessing of all her
friends.
THE NUPTIAL MEETING.
Isaac is in the fields, meditating upon his proposed passage from
celibacy to monogamy. And he sees a speck against the sky, then groups
of people, and after a while he finds that the grandest earthly
blessing that ever comes to a man is approaching with this gay
caravan.
In this my discourse on "The Wedding Ring," having spoken of the
choice of a lifetime companion, I take it for granted, O man, that
your marriage was divinely arranged, and that the camels have arrived
from the right direction and at the right time, bringing the one that
was intended for your consort--a Rebekah and not a Jezebel. I proceed
to discuss as to how you ought to treat your wife, and my ambition is
to tell you more plain truth than you ever heard in any three-quarters
of an hour in all your life.
THE RESPONSIBILITY UNDERTAKEN.
First of all, I charge you realize your responsibility in having taken
her from the custody and care and homestead in which she was once
sheltered. What courage you must have had, and what confidence in
yourself, to say to her practically: "I will be to you more than your
father and mother, more than all the friends you ever had or ever can
have! Give up everything and take me. I feel competent to see you
through life in safety. You are an immortal being, but I am competent
to defend you and make you happy. However bright and comfortable a
home you have now, and though in one of the rooms is the arm-chair in
which you rocked, and in the garret is the cradle in which you were
hushed and the trundle-bed in which you slept, and in the sitting-room
are the father and mother who have got wrinkle-faced, and
stoop-shouldered, and dim-eyesighted in taking care of you, yet you
will do better to come with me." I am amazed that any of us ever had
the sublimity of impudence to ask such a transfer from a home assured
to a home conjectured and unbuilt.
A RISKY VOYAGE.
You would think me a very daring and hazardous adventurer if I should
go down to one of the piers on the North River, and at a time when
there was a great lack of ship captains, and I should, with no
knowledge of navigation, propose to take a steamer across to Glasgow
or Havre, and say: "All aboard! Haul in the planks and swing out,"
and, passing out into the sea, plunge through darkness and storm. If I
succeeded in getting charge of a ship, it would be one that would
never be heard of again. But that is the boldness of every man that
proffers marriage. He says: "I will navigate you through the storms,
the cyclones, the fogs of a lifetime. I will run clear of rocks and
icebergs. I have no experience and I have no seaport, but all aboard
for the voyage of a lifetime! I admit that there have been ten
thousand shipwrecks on this very route, but don't hesitate! Tut! Tut!
There now! Don't cry! Brides must not cry at the wedding."
THE WIFE'S TEMERITY.
In response to this the woman, by her action, practically says: "I
have but one life to live, and I entrust it all to you. My arm is
weak, but I will depend on the strength of yours. I don't know much of
the world, but I rely on your wisdom. I put my body, my mind, my soul,
my time, my eternity, in your keeping. I make no reserve. Even my name
I resign and take yours, though mine is a name that suggests all that
was honorable in my father, and all that was good in my mother, and
all that was pleasant in my brothers and sisters. I start with you on
a journey which shall not part except at the edge of your grave or
mine. Ruth, the Moabitess, made no more thorough self-abnegation than
I make, when I take her tremendous words, the pathos of which many
centuries have not cooled:
Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee;
for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou
diest will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me and
more also, if aught but death part thee and me.' Side by side in life.
Side by side in the burying-ground. Side by side in heaven. Before God
and man, and with my immortal soul in the oath, I swear eternal
fidelity."
ENTITLED TO ADMIRATION.
Now, my brother, how ought you to treat her? Unless you are an ingrate
infinite you will treat her well. You will treat her better than any
one in the universe except your God. Her name will have in it more
music than in all that Chopin, or Bach, or Rheinberger composed. Her
eyes, swollen with three weeks of night watching over a child with
scarlet fever, will be to you beautiful as a May morning. After the
last rose petal has dropped out of her cheek, after the last feather
of the raven's wing has fallen from her hair, after across her
forehead, and under her eyes, and across her face there are as many
wrinkles as there are graves over which she has wept, you will be able
truthfully to say, in the words of Solomon's song: "Behold, thou art
fair, my love! Behold, thou art fair!" And perhaps she may respond
appropriately in the words that no one but the matchless Robert Burns
could ever have found pen or ink, or heart or brain to write:
"John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither.
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we'll go;
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo."
If any one assail her good name, you will have hard work to control
your temper, and if you should strike him down the sin will not be
unpardonable. By as complete a surrender as the universe ever
saw--except that of the Son of God for your salvation and mine--she
has a first mortgage on your body, mind and soul, and the mortgage is
foreclosed; and you do not more thoroughly own your two eyes or your
two hands than she owns you. The longer the journey Rebekah makes and
the greater the risks of her expedition on the back of the camels, the
more thoroughly is Isaac bound to be kind, and indulgent, and worthy.
LOVERS' PROMISES BINDING.
Now, be honest and pay your debts. You promised to make her happy. Are
you making her happy? You are an honest man in other things, and feel
the importance of keeping a contract. If you have induced her into a
conjugal partnership under certain pledges of kindness and valuable
attention, and then have failed to fulfill your word, you deserve to
have a suit brought against you for getting goods under false
pretences, and then you ought to be mulcted in a large amount of
damages. Review now all the fine, beautiful, complimentary, gracious
and glorious things you promised her before marriage and reflect
whether you have kept your faith. Do you say, "Oh, that was all
sentimentalism, and romance, and a joke," and that "they all talk that
way!" Well, let that plan be tried on yourself! Suppose I am
interested in Western lands, and I fill your mind with roseate
speculation, and I tell you that a city is already laid out on the
farm that I propose to sell you, and that a new railroad will run
close by, and have a depot for easy transportation of the crops, and
that eight or ten capitalists are going to put up fine residences
close by, and that the climate is delicious, and that the ground, high
up, gives no room for malaria, and that every dollar planted will grow
up into a bush bearing ten or twenty dollars, and my speech glows with
enthusiasm until you rush off with me to an attorney to have the deed
drawn, and the money paid down, and the bargain completed. You can
hardly sleep nights because of the El Dorado, the Elysium, upon which
you are soon to enter.
A WESTERN EDEN.
You give up your home at the East, you bid good-bye to your old
neighbors, and take the train, and after many days' journey you arrive
at a quiet depot, from which you take a wagon thirty miles through the
wilderness, and reach your new place. You see a man seated on a wet
log, in a swamp, and shaking with the fifteenth attack of chills and
fever, and ask him who he is. He says: "I am a real estate agent,
having in charge the property around here." You ask him where the new
depot is. He tells you that it has not yet been built, but no doubt
will be if the company get their bill for the track through the next
legislature. You ask him where the new city is laid out. He says, with
chattering teeth: "If you will wait till this chill is off, I will
show it to you on the map I have in my pocket." You ask him where the
capitalists are going to build their fine houses, and he says:
"Somewhere along those lowlands out there by those woods, when the
water has been drained off." That night you sleep in the hut of the
real estate agent, and though you pray for everybody else, you do not
pray for me. Being more fortunate than many men who go out in such
circumstances, you have money enough to get back, and you come to me,
and out of breath in your indignation, you say: "You have swindled me
out of everything. What do you mean in deceiving me about that Western
property?" "Oh," I reply, "that was all right; that was
sentimentalism, and romance, and a joke. That's the way they all
talk!"
But more excusable would I be in such deception than you, O man, who
by glow of words and personal magnetism induced a womanly soul into
surroundings which you have taken no care to make attractive, so that
she exchanged her father's house for the dismal swamp of married
experience--treeless, flowerless, shelterless, comfortless and
godless. I would not be half so much to blame in cheating you out of a
farm as you in cheating a woman out of the happiness of a lifetime.
LOVERS' ATTENTIONS.
My brother, do not get mad at what I say, but honestly compare the
promises you made, and see whether you have kept them. Some of you
spent every evening of the week with your betrothed before marriage,
and since then you spent every evening away, except you have influenza
or some sickness on account of which the doctor says you must not go
out. You used to fill your conversation with interjections of
adulation, and now you think it sounds silly to praise the one who
ought to be more attractive to you as the years go by, and life grows
in severity of struggle and becomes more sacred by the baptism of
tears--tears over losses, tears over graves. Compare the way some of
you used to come in the house in the evening, when you were attempting
the capture of her affections, and the way some of you come into the
house in the evening now.
DON'T BE PREOCCUPIED.
Then what politeness, what distillation of smiles, what graciousness,
sweet as the peach orchard in blossom week! Now, some of you come in
and put your hat on the rack and scowl, and say: "Lost money to-day!"
and you sit down at the table and criticise the way the food is
cooked. You shove back before the others are done eating, and snatch
up the evening paper and read, oblivious of what has been going on in
that home all day. The children are in awe before the domestic
autocrat. Bubbling over with fun, yet they must be quiet; with
healthful curiosity, yet they must ask no questions. The wife has had
enough annoyances in the nursery, and parlor, and kitchen to fill her
nerves with nettles and spikes. As you have provided the money for
food and wardrobe, you feel you have done all required of you. Toward
the good cheer, and the intelligent improvement, and the moral
entertainment of that home, which at the longest can last but a few
years, you are doing nothing. You seem to have no realization of the
fact that soon these children will be grown up or in their sepulchres,
and will be far removed from your influence, and that the wife will
soon end her earthly mission, and that house will be occupied by
others, and you yourself will be gone.
Gentlemen, fulfill your contracts. Christian marriage is an affectional
bargain. In heathen lands a man wins his wife by achievements. In some
countries wives are bought by the payment of so many dollars, as so many
cattle or sheep. In one country the man gets on a horse and rides down
where a group of women are standing, and seizes one of them by the hair,
and lifts her, struggling and resisting, on his horse, and if her
brothers and friends do not overtake her before she gets to the jungle,
she is his lawful wife. In another land the masculine candidate for
marriage is beaten by the club of the one whom he would make his bride.
If he cries out under the pounding, he is rejected. If he receives the
blows uncomplainingly, she is his by right. Endurance, and bravery, and
skill decide the marriage in barbarous lands, but Christian marriage is
a voluntary bargain, in which you promise protection, support,
companionship and love.
THE TERMS OF THE CONTRACT.
Business men have in their fire-proof safes a file of papers
containing their contracts, and sometimes they take them out and read
them over to see what the party of the first part and the party of the
second part really bound themselves to do. Different ministers of
religion have their own peculiar forms of marriage ceremony; but if
you have forgotten what you promised at the altar of wedlock, you had
better buy or borrow an Episcopal Church-Service, which contains the
substance of all intelligent marriage ceremonies, when it says: "I
take thee to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day
forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge thee my
troth." Would it not be a good idea to have that printed in tract form
and widely distributed?
NEVER FLIRT.
The fact is, that many men are more kind to everybody else's wives
than to their own wives. They will let the wife carry a heavy coal
scuttle upstairs, and will at one bound clear the width of a parlor to
pick up some other lady's pocket-handkerchief. There is an evil which
I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men--namely,
husbands in flirtation. The attention they ought to put upon their own
wives they bestow upon others. They smile on them coyly and askance,
and with a manner that seems to say: "I wish I was free from that old
drudge at home. What an improvement you would be on my present
surroundings!" And bouquets are sent, and accidental meetings take
place, and late at night the man comes to his prosaic home, whistling
and hilarious, and wonders that the wife is jealous. There are
thousands of men who, while not positively immoral, need radical
correction of their habits in this direction. It is meanness
immeasurable for a man by his behavior to seem to say to his wife:
"You can't help yourself, and I will go where I please, and admire
whom I please, and I defy your criticism."
Why did you not have that put in the bond, O domestic Shylock? Why did
you not have it understood before you were pronounced husband and wife
that she should have only a part of the dividend of your affections;
that when, as time rolled on and the cares of life had erased some of
the bright lines from her face, and given unwieldiness to her form,
you would have the reserved right to pay obeisance to cheeks more
rubicund, and figure lither and more agile, and as you demanded the
last pound of patience and endurance on her part you could, with the
emphasis of an Edwin Forrest or a Macready, have tapped the eccentric
marriage document and have said: "It's in the bond!" If this modern
Rebekah had understood beforehand where she was alighting she would
have ordered the camel drivers to turn the caravan backward toward
Padan-aram. Flirtation has its origin either in dishonesty or
licentiousness. The married man who indulges in it is either a fraud
or a rake. However high up in society such a one may be, and however
sought after, I would not give a three-cent piece, though it had been
three times clipped, for the virtue of the masculine flirt.
TONE UP.
The most worthy thing for the thousands of married men to do is to go
home and apologize for past neglects and brighten up their old love.
Take up the family Bible and read the record of the marriage day. Open
the drawer of relics in the box inside the drawer containing the
trinkets of your dead child. Take up the pack of yellow-colored
letters that were written before you became one. Rehearse the scenes
of joy and sorrow in which you have mingled. Put all these things as
fuel on the altar, and by a coal of sacred fire rekindle the
extinguished light. It was a blast from hell that blew it out, and a
gale from heaven will fan it into a blaze.
Ye who have broken marriage vows, speak out! take your wife into all
your plans, your successes, your defeats, your ambitions. Tell her
everything. Walk arm in arm with her into places of amusement, and on
the piazza of summer watering places, and up the rugged way of life,
and down through dark ravine, and when one trembles on the way let the
other be re-enforcement. In no case pass yourself off as a single man,
practicing gallantries. Do not, after you are fifty years of age, in
ladies' society, try to look young-mannish.
RESPECT HER PIETY.
Interfere not with your wife's religious nature. Put her not in that
awful dilemma in which so many Christian wives are placed by their
husbands, who ask them to go to places or do things which compel them
to decide between loyalty to God and loyalty to the husband. Rather
than ask her to compromise her Christian character encourage her to be
more and more a Christian, for there will be times in your life when
you will want the help of all her Christian resources; and certainly,
when you remember how much influence your mother had over you, you do
not want the mother of your children to set a less gracious example.
It pleases me greatly to hear the unconverted and worldly husband say
about his wife, with no idea that it will get to her ears: "There is
the most godly woman alive. Her goodness is a perpetual rebuke to my
waywardness. Nothing on earth could ever induce her to do a wrong
thing. I hope the children will take after her instead of after me. If
there is any heaven at all I am sure she will go there."
THE PRIEST OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
Ay, my brother, do you not think it would be a wise and a safe thing
for you to join her on the road to heaven? You think you have a happy
home now, but what a home you would have if you both were religious!
What a new sacredness it would give to your marital relation, and what
a new light it would throw on the forehead of your children! In
sickness, what a comfort! In reverses of fortune, what a wealth! In
death, what a triumph! God meant you to be the high priest of your
household. Go home to-day and take the Bible on your lap, and gather
all your family yet living around you, and those not living will hear
of it in a flash, and as ministering spirits will hover--father and
mother and children gone, and all your celestial kindred. Then kneel
down, and if you can't think of a prayer to offer I will give you a
prayer--namely: "Lord God, I surrender to Thee myself and my beloved
wife, and these dear children. For Christ's sake forgive all the past
and help us for all the future. We have lived together here, may we
live together forever. Amen and amen." Dear me, what a stir it would
make among your best friends on earth and in heaven.
A HUSBAND IMPRISONED.
Joseph the Second, the Emperor, was so kind and so philanthropic that
he excited the unbounded love of most of his subjects. He abolished
serfdom, established toleration and lived in the happiness of his
people. One day while on his way to Ostend to declare it a free port,
and while at the head of a great procession, he saw a woman at the
door of her cottage in dejection. The Emperor dismounted and asked the
cause of her grief. She said that her husband had gone to Ostend to
see the Emperor, and had declined to take her with him; for, as he was
an alien, he could not understand her loyal enthusiasm, and that it
was the one great desire of her life to see the ruler for whose
kindness and goodness and greatness she had an unspeakable
admiration; and her disappointment in not being able to go and see him
was simply unbearable.
The Emperor Joseph took from his pocket a box decorated with diamonds
surrounding a picture of himself and presented it to her, and when the
picture revealed to whom she was talking she knelt in reverence and
clapped her hands in gladness before him. The Emperor took the name of
her husband and the probable place where he might be found at Ostend,
and had him imprisoned for the three days of the Emperor's visit, so
that the husband returning home found that the wife had seen the
Emperor while he had not seen him.
In many families of this earth the wife, through the converting grace
of God, has seen the "King in His beauty," and He has conferred upon
her the pearl of great price, while the husband is an "alien from the
covenant of promise, without God and without hope in the world," and
imprisoned in worldliness and sin. Oh, that they might arm in arm go
this day and see Him, who is not only greater and lovelier than any
Joseph of earthly dominion, but "high over all, in earth, and air, and
sky!" His touch is life. His voice is music. His smile is heaven.
DUTIES OF WIVES TO HUSBANDS.
"The name of his wife was Abigail; and she was a woman of good
understanding and of a beautiful countenance."--1 SAMUEL 25:3.
The ground in Carmel is white, not with fallen snow, but the wool from
the backs of three thousand sheep, for they are being sheared. And I
hear the grinding of the iron blades together, and the bleating of the
flocks, held between the knees of the shearers, while the clipping
goes on, and the rustic laughter of the workmen. Nabal and his wife
Abigail preside over this homestead. David, the warrior, sends a
delegation to apply for aid at this prosperous time of sheep-shearing,
and Nabal peremptorily declines his request. Revenge is the cry.
Yonder over the rocks come David and four hundred angry men with one
stroke to demolish Nabal and his sheepfolds and vineyards. The
regiment marches in double quick, and the stones of the mountain
loosen and roll down, as the soldiers strike them with their swift
feet, and the cry of the commander is "Forward! Forward!"
A FAIR PROPITIATOR.
Abigail, to save her husband and his property, hastens to the foot of
the hill. She is armed, not with sword or spear, but with her own
beauty and self-sacrifice, and when David sees her kneeling at the
base of the craig, he cries: "Halt! Halt!" and the caverns echo it:
"Halt! Halt!" Abigail is the conqueress! One woman in the right
mightier than four hundred men in the wrong! A hurricane stopped at
the sight of a water-lily! A dewdrop dashed back Niagara! By her
prowess and tact she has saved her husband, and saved her home, and
put before all ages an illustrious specimen of what a wife can do if
she be godly, and prudent, and self-sacrificing, and vigilant, and
devoted to the interests of her husband, and attractive.
As, Sabbath before last, I took the responsibility of telling husbands
how they ought to treat their wives--and, though I noticed that some
of the men squirmed a little in their pew, they endured it well--I now
take the responsibility of telling how wives ought to treat their
husbands. I hope your domestic alliance was so happily formed that
while married life may have revealed in him some frailties that you
did not suspect, it has also displayed excellencies that more than
overbalanced them. I suppose that if I could look into the heart of a
hundred wives here present and ask them where is the kindest and best
man they know of, and they dared speak out, ninety-nine out of a
hundred of them would say: "At the other end of this pew."
ABIGAIL'S BAD BARGAIN.
I hope, my sister, you have married a man as Christian and as well
balanced as that. But even if you were worsted in conjugal bargain,
you cannot be worse off than this Abigail in my text. Her husband was
cross and ungrateful, an inebriate, for on the very evening after her
heroic achievement at the foot of the hill, where she captured a whole
regiment with her genial and strategic behaviour, she returned home
and found her husband so drunk that she could not tell him the story,
but had to postpone it until the next day. So, my sister, I do not
want you to keep saying within yourself as I proceed: "That is the way
to treat a perfect husband;" for you are to remember that no wife was
ever worse swindled than this Abigail of my text. At the other end of
her table sat a mean, selfish, snarling, contemptible sot, and if she
could do so well for a dastard, how ought you to do with that princely
and splendid man with whom you are to walk the path of life?
First, I counsel the wife to remember in what a severe and terrific
battle of life her husband is engaged. Whether in professional, or
commercial, or artistic, or mechanical life, your husband from morning
to night is in a Solferino, if not a Sedan. It is a wonder that your
husband has any nerves or patience or suavity left. To get a living in
this next to the last decade of the nineteenth century is a struggle.
If he come home and sit down preoccupied, you ought to excuse him. If
he do not feel like going out that night for a walk or entertainment,
remember he has been out all day. You say he ought to leave at his
place of business his annoyances and come home cheery. But if a man
has been betrayed by a business partner, or a customer has cheated him
out of a large bill of goods, or a protested note has been flung on
his desk, or somebody has called him a liar, and everything has gone
wrong from morning till night, he must have great genius and
forgetfulness if he do not bring some of the perplexity home with him.
When you tell me he ought to leave it all at the store or bank or
shop, you might as well tell a storm on the Atlantic to stay out there
and not touch the coast or ripple the harbor.
RESPECT SELF-SACRIFICE.
Remember, he is not overworking so much for himself as he is
overworking for you and the children. It is the effect of his success
or defeat on the homestead that causes him the agitation. The most of
men after forty-five years of age live not for themselves, but for
their families. They begin to ask themselves anxiously the question:
"How if I should give out, what would become of the folks at home?
Would my children ever get their education? Would my wife have to go
out into the world to earn bread for herself and our little ones? My
eyesight troubles me; how if my eyes should fail? My head gets dizzy;
how if I should drop under apoplexy?" The high pressure of business
life and mechanical life and agricultural life is home pressure.
Some time ago a large London firm decided that if any of their clerks
married on a salary less than L150--that is, $750 a year--he should be
discharged, the supposition being that the temptation might be too
great for misappropriation. The large majority of families in America
live by utmost dint of economy, and to be honest and yet meet one's
family expenses is the appalling question that turns the life of tens
of thousands of men into martyrdom. Let the wife of the overborne and
exhausted husband remember this, and do not nag him about that, and
say you might as well have no husband when the fact is he is dying by
inches that the home may be kept up.
BE LOVABLE.
I charge also the wife to keep herself as attractive after marriage as
she was before marriage. The reason that so often a man ceases to
love his wife is because the wife ceases to be lovable. In many cases
what elaboration of toilet before marriage, and what recklessness of
appearance after! The most disgusting thing on earth is a slatternly
woman--I mean a woman who never combs her hair until she goes out, or
looks like a fright until somebody calls. That a man married to one of
these creatures stays at home as little as possible is no wonder. It
is a wonder that such a man does not go on a whaling voyage of three
years, and in a leaky ship. Costly wardrobe is not required; but, O
woman! if you are not willing, by all that ingenuity of refinement can
effect, to make yourself attractive to your husband, you ought not to
complain if he seek in other society those pleasant surroundings which
you deny him.
DO NOT COMPLAIN.
Again, I charge you never talk to others about the frailties of your
husband.[1] Some people have a way, in banter, of elaborately
describing to others the shortcomings or unhappy eccentricities of a
husband or wife. Ah, the world will find out soon enough all the
defects of your companion! No need of your advertising them! Better
imitate those women who, having made mistake in affiance, always have
a veil to hide imperfections and alleviations of conduct to mention.
We must admit that there are rare cases where a wife cannot live
longer with her husband, and his cruelties and outrages are the
precursor of divorcement or separation. But until that day comes, keep
the awful secret to yourself--keep it from every being in the universe
except the God to whom you do well to tell your trouble. Trouble only
a few years at most, and then you can go up on the other side of the
grave, and say: "O Lord, I kept the marital secret! Thou knowest how
well I kept it, and I thank Thee that the release has come at last.
Give me some place where I can sit down and rest awhile from the
horrors of an embruted earthly alliance, before I begin the full
raptures of heaven." And orders will be sent out to the usher angels,
saying: "Take this Abigail right up to the softest seat in the best
room of the palace, and let twenty of the brightest angels wait on her
for the next thousand years."
AVOID MEDDLERS.
Further, I charge you, let there be no outside interference with the
conjugal relation. Neither neighbor nor confidential friend, nor
brother, nor sister, nor father, nor mother, have a right to come in
here. The married gossip will come around, and by the hour tell you
how she manages her husband. You tell her plainly that if she will
attend to the affairs of her household you will attend to yours. What
damage some people do with their tongues! Nature indicates that the
tongue is a dangerous thing, by the fact that it is shut in, first by
a barricade of teeth, and then by the door of the lips. One insidious
talker can keep a whole neighborhood badly stirred up. The Apostle
Peter excoriated these busybodies in other people's matters, and St.
Paul, in his letter to the Thessalonians and to Timothy, gives them a
sharp dig, and the good housewife will be on the lookout for them, and
never return their calls, and treat them with coldest frigidity. For
this reason, better keep house as soon as possible. Some people are
opposed to them, but I thank God for what are called flats in these
cities. They put a separate home within the means of nearly all the
population. In your married relations you do not need any advice. If
you and your husband have not skill enough to get along well alone,
with all the advice you can import you will get along worse. What you
want for your craft on this voyage is plenty of sea-room.
BE INTELLIGENT.
I charge you, also, make yourself the intelligent companion of your
husband. What with these floods of newspapers and books there is no
excuse for the wife's ignorance either about the present or the past.
If you have no more than a half-hour every day to yourself you may
fill your mind with entertaining and useful knowledge. Let the
merchant's wife read up on all mercantile questions, and the
mechanic's wife on all that pertains to his style of work, and the
professional man's wife on all the legal, or medical, or theological,
or political discussions of the day. It is very stupid for a man,
after having been amid active minds all day, to find his wife without
information or opinions on anything. If the wife knows nothing about
what is going on in the world, after the tea-hour has passed, and the
husband has read the newspaper, he will have an engagement and must
"go and see a man." In nine cases out of ten when a man does not stay
at home in the evening, unless positive duty calls him away, it is
because there is nothing to stay for. He would rather talk with his
wife than anyone else if she could talk as well.
ADORN THE HOME.
I charge you, my sister, in every way to make your home attractive. I
have not enough of practical knowledge about house adornment to know
just what makes the difference, but here is an opulent house,
containing all wealth of _bric-a-brac_, and of musical instrument, and
of painting, and of upholstery, and yet there is in it a chill like
Nova Zembla. Another home, with one-twentieth part of the outlay, and
small supply of art, and cheapest piano purchasable, and yet, as you
enter it, there comes upon body, mind, and soul a glow of welcome and
satisfied and happy domesticity. The holy art of making the most
comfort and brightness out of the means afforded, every wife should
study.
At the siege of Argus, Pyrrhus was killed by the tile of a roof thrown
by a woman, and Abimelech was slain by a stone that a woman threw from
the tower of Thebes, and Earl Montfort was destroyed by a rock
discharged at him by a woman from the walls of Toulouse. But without
any weapon save that of her cold, cheerless household arrangement, any
wife may slay all the attractions of a home circle. A wife and mother
in prosperous circumstances and greatly admired was giving her chief
time to social life. The husband spent his evenings away. The son,
fifteen years of age, got the same habit, and there was a prospect
that the other children, as they got old enough, would take the same
turn. One day the wife aroused to the consideration that she had
better save her husband and her boy. Interesting and stirring games
were introduced into the house. The mother studied up interesting
things to tell her children. One morning the son said:
"Father, you ought to have been home last night. We had a grand time.
Such jolly games and such interesting stories!" This went on from
night to night, and after a while the husband stayed in to see what
was going on, and he finally got attracted, and added something of his
own to the evening entertainments; and the result was that the wife
and mother saved her husband and saved her boy and saved herself. Was
not that an enterprise worth the attention of the greatest woman that
ever lived since Abigail at the foot of the rock arrested the four
hundred armed warriors?
THE TRUE SPHERE.
Do not, my sister, be dizzied and disturbed by the talk of those who
think the home circle too insignificant for a woman's career, and who
want to get you out on platforms and in conspicuous enterprises. There
are women who have a special outside mission, and do not dare to
interpret me as derisive of their important mission. But my opinion is
that the woman who can reinforce her husband in the work of life and
rear her children for positions of usefulness is doing more for God
and the race and her own happiness than if she spoke on every great
platform and headed a hundred great enterprises. My mother never made
a missionary speech in her life, and at a missionary meeting I doubt
whether she could have got enough courage to vote aye or no, but she
raised her son John, who has been preaching the Gospel and translating
religious literature in Amoy, China, for about forty years. Was not
that a better thing to do?
Compare such an one with one of these dieaway, attitudinizing,
frivolous, married coquettes of the modern drawing-room, her heaven an
opera box on the night of Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable," the ten
commandments an inconvenience, taking arsenic to improve the
complexion, and her appearance a confused result of belladonna,
bleached hair, antimony and mineral acids, until one is compelled to
discuss her character, and wonder whether the line between a decent
and indecent life is, like the equator, an imaginary line.
A PRESSING WANT.
What the world wants now is about fifty thousand old-fashioned
mothers, women who shall realize that the highest, grandest, mightiest
institution on earth is the home. It is not necessary that they should
have the same old-time manners of the country farm-house, or wear the
old-fashioned cap and spectacles and apron that her glorified ancestry
wore; but I mean the old spirit which began with the Hannahs and the
Mother Lois and the Abigails of Scripture days, and was demonstrated
on the homestead where some of us were reared, though the old house
long ago was pulled down and its occupants scattered, never to meet
until in the higher home that awaits the families of the righteous.
While there are more good and faithful wives and mothers now than
there ever were, society has got a wrong twist on this subject, and
there are influences abroad that would make women believe their chief
sphere is outside instead of inside the home.
A DEADLY SIN.
Hence in many households, children instead of a blessing are a
nuisance. It is card case _versus_ child's primer, carriage _versus_
cradle, social popularity _versus_ domestic felicity. Hence
infanticide and antenatal murder so common that all the physicians,
allopathic, hydropathic, homoeopathic, and eclectic are crying out in
horror, and it is time that the pulpits joined with the medical
profession in echoing and re-echoing the thunder of Mount Sinai, which
says: "Thou shalt not kill," and the book of Revelation, which says:
"All murderers shall have their place in the lake which burneth with
fire and brimstone." And the man or the woman who takes life a minute
old will as certainly go straight to hell as the man or woman who
destroys life forty years old. And the wildest, loudest shriek of
Judgment Day will be given at the overthrow of those who moved in the
high and respected circles of earthly society, yet decreed by their
own act, as far as they could privately effect it, the extermination
of the advancing generations, abetted in the horrid crime by a lot of
infernal quacks with which modern medicine is infested. When, on the
Last Day, the crier of the Court shall with resounding "Oyez," "Oyez!"
declare the "Oyer and Terminer" of the Universe opened, and the Judge,
with gavel of thunderbolt, shall smite the nations into silence, and
the trial of all the fratricides, and parricides, and matricides, and
patricides, and uxoricides, and regicides, and deicides, and
infanticides of the earth shall proceed, none of my hearers or readers
can say that they knew not what they were doing. Mighty God! arrest
the evil that is overshadowing this century.
THE HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
I charge you, my sister, that you take your husband along with you to
heaven. Of course this implies that you yourself are a Christian. I
must take that for granted. It cannot be possible that after what
Christianity has done for woman, and after taking the infinitely
responsible position you have assumed as the head of the household,
that you should be in a position antagonistic to Christ. It was not a
slip of the tongue when I spoke of you as being at the head of the
household. We men rather pride ourselves as being at the head of the
household, but it is only a pleasant delusion. To whom do the children
go when they have trouble? When there is a sore finger to be bound up
or one of the first teeth that needs to be removed to make way for one
that is crowding it out, to whom does the child go? For whom do
children cry out in the night when they get frightened at a bad dream?
Aye, to whom does the husband go when he has a business trouble too
great or too delicate for outside ears? We, the men, are heads of the
household in name, but you, O wives! are the heads of the household in
fact, and it is your business to take your husband with you into the
kingdom of God, and see that house prepared for heaven.
You can do it! Of course God's almighty grace alone can convert him,
but you are to be the instrument. Some wives keep their husbands out
of heaven, and others garner them for it. If your religion, O wife! is
simply the joke of the household, if you would rather go to the
theatre than the prayer-meeting, if you can beat all the neighborhood
in progressive euchre, if your husband never sees you kneel at the
bedside in prayer before retiring, if the only thing that reminds the
family of your church relations is that on communion-day you get home
late to dinner, you will not be able to take your husband to heaven,
for the simple reason that you will not get there yourself. But I
suppose that your religion is genuine, and that the husband realizes
that there is in your soul a divine principle, and that, though you
may be naturally quicker tempered than he is and have many
imperfections that distress you more than they can any one else, still
you are destined for the skies when the brief scenes of this life are
over. How will you take him with you? There are two oars to that
boat--prayer and holy example.
But you say he belongs to a worldly club, or he does not believe a
word of the Bible, or he is an inebriate and very loose in his habits?
What you tell me shows that you don't understand that while you are at
the one end of a prayer, the omnipotent God is at the other end, and
it is simply a question whether Almightiness is strong enough and
keeps His word. I have no doubt there will be great conventions in
heaven, called for celebrative purposes, and when in some Celestial
assemblage the saints shall be telling what brought them to God, I
believe that ten thousand times ten thousand will say: "My wife."
A CONTRAST.
I put beside each other two testimonies of men concerning their wives,
and let you see the contrast. An aged man was asked the reason of his
salvation. With tearful emotion he said: "My wife was brought to God
some years before myself. I persecuted and abused her because of her
religion. She, however, returned nothing but kindness, constantly
maintaining an anxiety to promote my comfort and happiness; and it was
her amiable conduct when suffering ill-treatment from me that first
sent the arrows of conviction to my soul." The other testimony was
from a dying man: "Harriet, I am a lost man. You opposed our family
worship and my secret prayer. You drew me away into temptation and to
neglect every religious duty. I believe my fate is sealed. Harriet,
you are the cause of my everlasting ruin." How many glorious married
couples in heaven--Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Lapidoth and
Deborah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Zacharias and Elizabeth,
Joseph and Mary, and many whom we have known as good as the most of
them!
As once you stood in the village or city church or in your father's
house, perhaps under a wedding-bell of flowers, to-day stand up,
husband and wife, beneath the cross of a pardoning Redeemer, while I
proclaim the banns of an eternal marriage. Join your right hands. I
pronounce you one forever. The circle is an emblem of eternity, and
that is the shape of the Wedding Ring.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] As Abigail did (1 Sam. 25:25).
COSTUME AND MORALS.
"Moreover the Lord said, Because the daughters of Zion are
haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes,
walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their
feet: in that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their
tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their
round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and
the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and
the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and
nose-jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles,
and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the
fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils,"--ISAIAH 3:16,
18-23.[2]
This is a Jerusalem fashion plate. It puts us two thousand six hundred
years back, and sets us down in an ancient city. The procession of men
and women is moving up and down the gay streets. It is the height of
the fashionable season. The sensible men and women move with so much
modesty that they do not attract our attention. But here come the
haughty daughters of Jerusalem! They lean forward; they lean very much
forward--so far forward as to be unnatural--teetering, wobbling,
wriggling, flirting, or, as my text describes it, they "walk with
stretched-forth necks, walking and mincing as they go."
See! That is a princess. Look! That is a Damascus sword-maker. Look!
That is a Syrian merchant. The jingling of the chains, and the lashing
of the headbands, and the exhibitions of universal swagger attract the
attention of the Prophet Isaiah, and he brings his camera to bear upon
the scene, and takes a picture for all the ages. But where is that
scene? Vanished. Where are those gay streets? Vermin-covered
population pass through them. Where are the hands, and the necks, and
the foreheads, and the shoulders, and the feet that sported all that
magnificence? Ashes! Ashes!
That we should all be clad is proved by the opening of
THE FIRST WARDROBE
in Paradise, with its apparel of dark green. That we should all as far
as our means allow us be beautifully and gracefully apparelled is
proved by the fact that God never made a wave but He gilded it with
golden sunbeams, or a tree but He garlanded it with blossoms, or a
sky but He studded it with stars, or allowed even the smoke of a
furnace to ascend but He columned, and turreted, and doled, and
scrolled it into outlines of indescribable gracefulness. When I see
the apple orchards of the spring and the pageantry of the autumnal
forests, I come to the conclusion that if nature ever does join the
Church, while she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, she
never will be a Quaker in the style of her dress. Why the notches of a
fern leaf or the stamen of a water lily? Why, when the day departs,
does it let the folding doors of heaven stay open so long, when it
might go in so quickly? One summer morning I saw an army of a million
spears, each one adorned with a diamond of the first water--I mean the
grass with the dew on it.
When the prodigal came home his father not only put a coat on his
back, but jewelry on his hand. Christ wore a beard, Paul, the bachelor
apostle, not afflicted with any sentimentality, admired the
arrangement of a woman's hair, when he said in his epistle: "If a
woman have long hair, it is a glory unto her." There will be fashion
in heaven as on earth, but it will be a different kind of fashion. It
will decide the color of the dress; and the population of that
country, by a beautiful law, will wear white.
THE GODDESS OF FASHION.
I say these things as a background to my sermon, to show you that I
have no prim, precise, prudish, or cast-iron theories on the subject
of human apparel; but the goddess of fashion has set up her throne in
this country and at the sound of the timbrels we are all expected to
fall down and worship. Her altars smoke with the sacrifice of the
bodies and souls of ten thousand victims.
When I come to count the victims of fashion I find as many masculine
as feminine. Men make an easy tirade against woman, as though she were
the chief worshipper at this idolatrous shrine, and no doubt some men
in the more conspicuous part of the pew have already cast glances at
the more retired part of the pew, their look a prophecy of a generous
distribution. My sermon shall be as appropriate for one end of the pew
as for the other.
MASCULINE FOLLIES.
Men are as much the idolaters of fashion as women, but they sacrifice
on a different part of the altar. With men the fashion goes to cigars,
and club-rooms, and yachting parties, and wine suppers. In the United
States the men chew up and smoke one hundred millions of dollars'
worth of tobacco every year. That is their fashion. In London not
long ago a man died who started in life with $750,000; but he ate it
all up in gluttonies, sending his agents to all parts of the earth for
some rare delicacy for the palate, sometimes one plate of food costing
him three or four hundred dollars. He ate up his whole fortune, and
had only one guinea left. With that he bought a woodcock, and had it
dressed in the very best style, ate it, gave two hours for digestion,
then walked out on Westminster Bridge and threw himself into the
Thames and died, doing on a large scale what you and I have often seen
done on a small scale.
But men do not abstain from millinery and elaboration of skirt through
any superiority of simplicity. It is only because such appendages
would be a blockade to business. What would sashes and trains three
and a half yards long do in a stock market? And yet men are the
disciples of custom just as much as women. Some of them wear boots so
tight that they can hardly walk in the paths of righteousness, and
there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes and never pay for
them, and who go through the streets in great stripes of color, like
animated checkerboards. I say these things because I want to show you
that I am impartial in my discourse, and that both sexes, in the
language of the surrogate's office, "share and share alike."
INDELICATE APPAREL.
As God may help me I am going to set forth the evil effects of
improper dress or an excessive discipleship of costume. It is a simple
truth that you all know, although the pulpit has not yet uttered it,
that much of the womanly costume of our time is the cause of the
temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a
shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for
vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can
come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of
masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided
reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer
of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, went up to a
so-called lady, and because of her sparse and incompetent apparel,
ordered her either to leave the house or habilitate herself
immediately. It is high time that our good and sensible women make
vehement protest against fashionable indecency, and if the women of
the household do not realize the deplorable extremes of much of the
female costume, that husbands implead their wives on this subject, and
that fathers prohibit their daughters. The evil is terrific and
overshadowing.
STAGE COSTUMES.
I suppose that the American stage is responsible for much of this. I
do not go to the theatres, so I must take the evidence of the actors
and managers of theatres, such as Mr. John Gilbert, Mr. A.M. Palmer,
and Mr. Daniel E. Bandmann. They have recently told us that the crime
of undress is blasting the theatre, which by many is considered a
school of morals, and indeed superior to the Church, and a forerunner
of the millennium. Mr. Palmer says: "The bulk of the performances on
the stage are degrading and pernicious. The managers strive to come
just as near the line as possible without flagrantly breaking the law.
There never have been costumes worn on a stage of this city, either in
a theatre, hall, or 'dive,' so improper as those that clothe some of
the chorus in recent comic opera productions." He says in regard to
the female performers: "It is not a question whether they can sing,
but just how little they will consent to wear." Mr. Bandmann, who has
been twenty-nine years on the stage, and before almost all
nationalities, says: "I unhesitatingly state that the taste of the
present theatre-going people of America, as a body, is of a coarse and
vulgar nature. The Hindoo would turn with disgust at such
exhibitions, which are sought after and applauded on the stage of this
country. Our shop windows are full of and the walls covered with show
cards and posters which should be a disgrace to an enlightened country
and an insult to the eye of a cultured community." Mr. Gilbert says:
"Such exhibition is a disastrous one to the morals of the community.
Are these proper pictures to put out for the public to look at, to say
nothing of the propriety of females appearing in public dressed like
that? It is shameful!"
I must take the testimony of the friends of the theatre and the
confirmation which I see on the board fences and in the show windows
containing the pictures of the way actresses dress. I suppose that
those representations of play-house costume are true, for if they are
not true, then those highly moral and religious theatres are swindling
the public by inducing the people to the theatre by promises of
spectacular nudity which they do not fulfill. Now, all this
familiarizes the public with such improprieties of costume and
depresses the public conscience as to what is allowable and right.
DRAWING-ROOM RIVALRY.
The parlor and drawing-room are now running a race with the theatre
and opera bouffe. They are now nearly neck and neck in the race, the
latter a little ahead; but the parlor and the drawing-room are gaining
on the others, and the probability is they will soon be even and pass
the stand so nearly at the same time that one half of Pandemonium will
clap its hands because opera bouffe has beaten, and the other half
because the drawing-room has beaten. Let printing-press, and platform,
and pulpit hurl red-hot anathema at the boldness of much of womanly
attire. I charge Christian women, neither by style of dress nor
adjustment of apparel, to become administrative of evil. Show me the
fashion plates of any age between this and the time of Louis XVI., of
France, and Henry VIII., of England, and I will tell you the type of
morals or immorals of that age or that year. No exception to it.
Modest apparel means a righteous people. Immodest apparel always means
a contaminated and depraved society.
EXTRAVAGANCE.
It is not only such boldness that is to be reprehended, but
extravagance of costume. This latter is the cause of fraud unlimitable
and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of the Revolution proposed to
sell his country in order to get money to support his home wardrobe? I
declare here before God and this people that the effort to keep up
expensive establishments in this country is sending more business men
to temporal perdition than all other causes combined. It was this that
sent prominent business men to the watering of stocks, and life
insurance presidents to perjured statements about their assets, and
some of them to the penitentiary, and has completely upset our
American finances.
But why should I go to these famous defaultings, to show what men will
do in order to keep up great home style and expensive wardrobe, when
you and I know scores of men who are put to their wit's end and are
lashed from January to December in the attempt? Our Washington
politicians may theorize until the expiration of their terms of office
as to the best way of improving our monetary condition in this
country. It will be of no use, and things will be no better until we
learn to put on our heads and backs and feet and hands no more than we
can pay for.
AN INCENTIVE TO DISHONESTY.
There are clerks in stores and banks on limited salaries who in the
vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of their family as showy as other
folk's wardrobes are dying of muffs, and diamonds, and camel's-hair
shawls, and high hats, and they have nothing left except what they
give to cigars and wine suppers, and they die before their time, and
they will expect us ministers to preach about them as though they were
the victims of early piety; and after a high-class funeral, with
silver handles at the side of their coffin of extraordinary
brightness, it will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of
his legitimate expenses! Do not send to me to preach the funeral
sermon of a man who dies like that. I would blurt out the whole truth,
and tell that he was strangled to death by his wife's ribbons! The
country is dressed to death.
You are not surprised to find that the putting up of one public
building in New York cost millions of dollars more than it ought to
have cost, when you find that the man who gave out the contracts paid
more than five thousand dollars for his daughter's wedding dress.
Cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are not rare on Broadway. It is
estimated that there are eight thousand women in these two cities who
have expended on their personal array two thousand dollars a year.
What are the men to do in order to keep up such home wardrobes?
Steal--that is the only respectable thing they can do! During the last
fifteen years there have been innumerable fine business men
shipwrecked on the wardrobe. The temptation comes in this way: a man
thinks more of his family than all the world outside, and if they
spend the evening in describing to him the superior wardrobe of the
family across the street that they cannot bear the sight of, the man
is thrown on his gallantry and his pride of family, and without
translating his feelings into plain language, he goes into extortion
and issuing of false stock and skillful penmanship in writing somebody
else's name at the foot of a promissory note; and they all go down
together--the husband to the prison, the wife to the sewing machine,
the children to be taken care of by those who were called poor
relations. Oh, for some new Shakespeare to arise and write
THE TRAGEDY OF CLOTHES!
Act the first of the tragedy: A plain but beautiful home. Enter the
newly married pair. Enter simplicity of manner and behavior. Enter as
much happiness as is ever found in one home.
Act the second: Discontent with the humble home. Enter envy. Enter
jealousy. Enter desire to display.
Act the third: Enlargement of expenses. Enter all the queenly
dressmakers. Enter the French milliners.
Act the fourth: The tip-top of society. Enter princes and princesses
of New York life. Enter magnificent plate and equipage. Enter
everything splendid.
Act the fifth and last, winding up the scene: Enter the assignee.
Enter the sheriff. Enter the creditors. Enter humiliation. Enter the
wrath of God. Enter the contempt of society. Enter death. Now, let the
silk curtain drop on the stage. The farce is ended, and the lights are
out.
Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape possible, that some of
the men in this country have to forge, and to perjure, and to swindle
to pay for their wives' dresses? I will say it whether you forgive me
or not.
CURTAILS BENEVOLENCE.
Again, extravagant costume is the foe of all Christian alms-giving.
Men and women put so much in personal display that they often have
nothing for God and the cause of suffering humanity--a Christian man
cracking his Palais Royal gloves across the back by shutting up his
hand to hide the one cent he puts into the poor box! a Christian woman
at the story of the Hottentots crying copious tears into a twenty-five
dollar handkerchief, and then giving a two-cent piece to the
collection, thrusting it down under the bills, so people will not know
but it was a ten-dollar gold piece! One hundred dollars for incense to
fashion--two cents for God! God gives us ninety cents out of every
dollar. The other ten cents, by command of His Bible, belong to Him.
Is not God liberal according to this tithing system laid down in the
Old Testament--is not God liberal in giving us ninety cents out of a
dollar when he takes but ten? We do not like that. We want to have
ninety-nine cents for ourselves and one for God.
Now, I would a great deal rather steal ten cents from you than God. I
think one reason why a great many people do not get along in worldly
accumulation faster is because they do not observe this Divine rule.
God says: "Well, if that man is not satisfied with ninety cents out of
a dollar, then I will take the whole dollar, and I will give it to the
man or woman who is honest with me." The greatest obstacle to charity
in the Christian church to-day is the fact that men expend so much on
their table, and women so much on their dress, they have got nothing
left for the work of God and the world's betterment.
DISTRACTS ATTENTION.
Again, extravagant costume is distraction to a public worship. You
know very well there are a good many people who go to church just as
they go to the races, to see who will come out first. Men and women
with souls to be saved passing the hour in wondering where that man
got his cravat, or what store that woman patronizes. In many of our
churches the preliminary exercises are taken up with the discussion
of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is it not wonderful that the Lord does
not strike the meeting-houses with lightning? What distraction of
public worship! Dying men and women, whose bodies are soon to be
turned into dust, yet before three worlds strutting like peacocks.
People sitting down in a pew or taking up a hymn book, all absorbed at
the same time in personal array, to sing:
"Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
Thy better portion trace;
Rise from transitory things
Toward heaven, thy native place!"
I adopt the Episcopalian prayer, and say: "Good Lord, deliver us!"
MENTAL IMPOVERISHMENT.
Extravagant costume belittles the intellect. Our minds are enlarged or
they dwindle just in proportion to the importance of the subject on
which we constantly dwell. Can you imagine anything more dwarfing to
the human intellect than the study of dress? I see men on the street
who, judging from their elaboration, I think must have taken two hours
to arrange their apparel. After a few years of that kind of
absorption, which one of McAllister's magnifying glasses will be
powerful enough to make the man's character visible? What will be left
of a woman's intellect after giving years and years to the discussion
of such questions? They all land in idiocy. I have seen men at the
summer watering-places through fashion the mere wreck of what they
once were. Sallow of cheek. Meagre of limb. Hollow at the chest.
Showing no animation save in rushing across a room to pick up a lady's
fan. Simpering along the corridors the same compliments they simpered
twenty years ago.
BARS HEAVEN.
Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder phase of this evil.
It shuts a great multitude out of heaven. The first peal of thunder
that shook Sinai declared: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me,"
and you will have to choose between the goddess of fashion and the
Christian God. There are a great many seats in heaven, and they are
all easy seats, but not one seat for the devotee of costume. Heaven is
for meek and quiet spirits. Heaven is for those who think more of
their souls than of their bodies.
Give up this idolatry of fashion or give up heaven. What would you do
standing beside the Countess of Huntingdon, whose joy it was to build
chapels for the poor; or with that Christian woman of Boston, who fed
fifteen hundred children of the street, at Fanueil Hall, one New
Year's Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the end of the
meeting a pair of shoes to each one of them; or those Dorcases of
modern society who have consecrated their needles to the Lord, and who
will get eternal reward for every stitch they take?
PERPETUAL ENVY.
Oh, men and women, give up the idolatry of costume! The rivalries and
the competitions of such a life are a stupendous wretchedness. You
will always find some one with brighter array, and with more palatial
residence, and with lavender kid gloves that make a tighter fit. And
if you buy this thing and wear it you will wish you had bought
something else and worn it. And the frets of such a life will bring
the crow's feet to your temples before they are due, and when you come
to die you will have a miserable time.
I have seen men and women of excessive costume die, and I never saw
one of them die well. The trappings off, there they lay on the tumbled
pillow, and there were just two things that bothered them--a wasted
life and a coming eternity. I could not pacify them, for their body,
mind, and soul had been exhausted in the worship of costume, and they
could not appreciate the Gospel. When I knelt by their bedside they
were mumbling out their regrets, and saying: "O God! O God!" Their
garments hung up in the wardrobe never again to be seen by them.
Without any exception, so far as my memory serves me, they died
without hope, and went into eternity unprepared. The two most ghastly
death-beds on earth are the one where a man dies of delirium tremens,
and the other where a woman dies after having sacrificed all her
faculties of body, mind and soul in the worship of costume.
JUDGMENT TO COME.
My friends, we must appear in judgment to answer for what we have worn
on our bodies as well as for what repentances we have exercised with
our souls. On that day I see coming in Beau Brummell of the last
century without his cloak; Aaron Burr, without the letters that to old
age he showed in pride, to prove his early wicked gallantries; and
Absalom without his hair; and Marchioness Pompadour without her
titles; and Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall Street, when that was the
centre of fashion, without her fripperies of vesture.
And in great haggardness they shall go away into eternal expatriation,
while among the queens of heavenly society will be found Vashti, who
wore the modest veil before the palatial bacchanalians; and Hannah,
who annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple; and
Grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imitated her virtue;
and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to the world; and many of you, the
wives, and mothers, and sisters, and daughters of the present
Christian church who, through great tribulation, are entering into the
kingdom of God. Christ announced who would make up the royal family of
heaven when He said: "Whosoever doeth the will of God, the same is my
brother, my sister, my mother."
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The list of feminine treasures given by the Revised Version is more
intelligible. It is: "Their anklets, and the networks, and the
crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets, and the mufflers; the
head-tires, and the ankle chains, and the sashes, and the perfume boxes,
and the amulets; the rings, and the nose-jewels; the festival robes, and
the mantles, and the shawls, and the satchels; the hand-mirrors, and the
fine linen, and the turbans, and the veils."
HUSBANDS AND WIVES.
"Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself;
and the wife see that she reverence her husband."--EPHESIANS
5:33.
All this good advice by a man who never married. He lived on to
fifty-eight years of age, in eminent bachelorhood. Indeed, it was
better for Paul to remain in single life, because he went on such
rapid missionary expeditions that no companion could have endured the
hardship. Celibacy in some cases is better. Such persons accomplish
under such circumstances that which could not be accomplished in the
other style of life.
I have known men who remain unaffianced in order that they might take
care of the children of a deceased brother; and what would become of
the world without the self-sacrifice and helpfulness of the maiden
aunts I cannot imagine.
Among the brightest queens of Heaven will be those who took care of
other people's children. Alas for that household which has not within
easy call an Aunt Mary! I know that there are caricatures, and
ungallant things sometimes said; but so far as my observation goes,
they are quite equal in disposition to their married sisters. The
state of celibacy is honored again by such persons as Macaulay and
Washington Irving in literature, and Florence Nightingale and Miss Dix
in philanthropy.
But while Paul remained in the single state, he kept his eyes open,
and he looked off upon the calm sea of married life, and upon the
chopped sea of domestic perturbation. He comes forth in my text to
say, "Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself;
and the wife see that she reverence her husband;" implying that the
wife ought to be lovable, so there might be something to love, and the
man ought to be honorable, so there might be something to reverence.
It is
A MOST CONGRATULATORY THOUGHT
that the vast majority of people in the married state are well mated.
When the news is first announced in the outside world of the
betrothal, there may be surprise and seeming incongruity, but as the
years pass by it is demonstrated that the selection was divinely
arranged. There may be great difference of temperament, great
difference of appearance, great difference of circumstances. That is
no objection. The sanguine and the phlegmatic temperaments make
appropriate union, the blonde and the brunette, the quick and the
slow, the French and the German. In the machinery of domestic life
there is no more need for the driving wheel than for the brakes. That
is the best union generally which has just the opposites.
The best argument in behalf of marriage as a divine institution is the
fact that the vast majority of conjugal relationships are the very
best things that could have happened. Once in a while there is a
resounding exception to the good rule, the attempt being made to marry
fire and gunpowder, with the consequent explosion in the divorce
courts; but in the vast majority of instances the conjugal relation is
a beautiful illustration of what the Psalmist said when he declared,
"God setteth the solitary in families."
Taking it for granted, then, that you are well mated, I proceed to
give you some
PRESCRIPTIONS FOR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS;
and, first of all, I remark:
I. A spirit of compromise must be dominant. You must remember that you
were twenty or thirty years forming independent habits and having your
own way. In the marriage state these habits must be brought into
accord, and there may be some ingenuity necessary. Be determined to
have your own way, and there will be no peace. Let the rule be: In
all matters of moral principle your determination shall be iron, and
in all unimportant matters, willow. Whatever you may think of the word
compromise in politics, without compromise there is no domestic peace.
A great many people are willing to compromise, if you will do just as
they want you to do; but there is no compromise in that. The rule
ought to be: In all domestic matters, all social matters, all
ecclesiastical matters, all political matters, firm adherence to
fundamentals, easy surrender in non-essentials. Be not too proud or
too stubborn to give up. Compromise! Compromise!
II. I remark, again, that in order to domestic happiness there must be
a spirit of
CONSULTATION.
The home ought to be a cabinet, where all the affairs of the household
and all the affairs of business life come under comparison, inspection
and advisal. That is an absurd rule we hear abroad in the world, that
men ought never to take their business home. Ten thousand financial
failures would have been avoided if men had consulted with their
wives.
In the first place, woman has a capacity to judge of moral character
which man has not. Before you invite into your business partnership
any man, you ought to introduce him to your wife, and get her judgment
as to his capacity and his integrity. After five minutes' conversation
she will tell you as much about him as you will know at the close of
twenty years, and perhaps you may find out too late.
A man proposes to come into your business partnership. You take him to
your home. He tarries a little while, and is gone. You say to your
wife, "Well, what do you think of him?" She says, "I don't like him at
all." You say, "It's an absurd thing to form a prejudice against him
on so short an acquaintance. I have known him for years, and I have
never known any bad against him." "Well," she says, "I don't know why
I have formed that opinion, but I tell you to beware. Put none of your
financial interests in that man's keeping." Ten or fifteen years pass
by. You come home some night and say, "Well, my dear, you are right;
that man swindled me out of my last dollar." It is not because woman
is wiser than man. It is because God has given her that peculiar
intuition in regard to human character.
Now, you have no right to go into an enterprise which involves the
homestead, or the education of your children, or the fate of your
entire family, without home consultation. Of course, all this implies
that you did not marry a fool. If at the marriage altar you committed
suicide, you had better keep all your business affairs in your own
heart and head. But let us hope that you have sound common sense
presiding in your household.
A BEAUTIFUL INCIDENT.
How much a wife may help a husband's business affairs was well
illustrated in the case where the wife saved from the allowance of
herself and the allowance of the family, a certain amount of money for
a rainy day. After some time the husband, coming home, said: "Well,
I'm going to suspend payment to-morrow. A few dollars would get me
through, but I can't get the few dollars, and I'm going to ruin." That
evening the wife said: "I wish you would hunt up the definition of the
word 'independence' in Webster's Dictionary. Hunt it up for me." He
opened Webster's Dictionary, and found the word "independence," and
right opposite was a $100 bill. "Now," she said, "I would like to have
you find the word 'gratitude.'" He turned to the word "gratitude," and
there was another $100 bill. And before the evening was past she asked
him to read a verse of a certain chapter of the Bible. He opened to
the verse in the Bible, and there were $500, and before the evening
had passed, the man had financial relief to tide him over his
disasters. You call that dramatic. I call that beautifully Christian.
In all expenditures there ought to be consultation. Do not dole out
money to your wife as though she were a beggar. Let her know how much
you have, or how little. Appeal to her intelligent judgment, and she
will be content, and your own disposition will not be irritated. As
long as you keep a mystery about your business matters she will wonder
that the allowance is so small. No honorable woman wants to spend more
money than can be afforded. Come into consultation with her on this
matter. Show what are all your necessary outside expenses, all the
money you have for cigars and dinners at Delmonico's, and how much it
takes for the club-house and for the political campaign, and then have
her present all the domestic expenses, and then, after consultation do
your best.
It is a bad sign when a man dare not tell his business transactions to
his wife. There is something wrong. Suppose you that the gigantic
forgeries which have been enacted in this country would ever have
taken place if the wife had been consulted? The wife would have said,
"Stop! Let us live in one room in the poorest house on the poorest
street of the poorest town, and have nothing but dry bread rather than
that you should make yourself culpable before God and the law." In
the vast majority of cases where there has been exposure of great
frauds, the wife has been the most surprised person in the community.
A BANKER
some time ago misused trust funds, and he went from fraud to fraud,
and from knavery to knavery, until it was necessary for him to leave
home before daylight. His wife said: "Where are you going?" "I am
going to New York," said he "I am going on the early train." "Why,
isn't this sudden?" she asked. "Oh, no; I expected to go," and then he
left the room and went up to the room where his daughters slept,
looked upon their calm faces for the last time, as he supposed, and
started. He was brought back by the constables of an outraged law, and
is now in the penitentiary.
Do you suppose that man, with a good wife, as he had, an honest wife,
as he had, a Christian wife, as he had, could have got into such an
enormity if he had consulted in regard to her wishes? Consultation is
the word--domestic consultation.
III. Again: in order to domestic happiness, there must, in the
conjugal state, be
NO SECRETS
kept one from the other. What one knows both must know. It is a bad
sign when one partner in the conjugal relation is afraid to have the
letters opened or read by the other partner. Surreptitious
correspondence is always dangerous. If a man comes to you and says, "I
am going to tell you a great privacy, and don't want you to tell
anybody, not even your wife," say to him, "Well, now, you had better
not tell me, for I shall tell her as soon as I get home."
There must be no secrecy of association. You ought not to be unwilling
to tell where you have been, and with whom you have been. Sometimes an
unwise wife will have a lady confidante whom she makes a depository of
privacies which they are pledged to keep between themselves. Beware!
Anything that implies that husband and wife are two and not one
implies peril, domestic peril, social peril, mighty peril.
In the vast majority of cases of domestic infelicity coming to
exposure in the courts, the trouble began by the accidental opening of
a letter which implied correspondence which was never suspected. In
the conjugal relations, secrets kept one from another are
nitro-glycerine under the hearthstone, and the fuse is lighted!
IV. Again: in order to your happiness there must be a spirit of
FORBEARANCE.
In the weeks, the months, the years that you were planning for each
other's conquest, only the more genial side of your nature was
observable, but now you are off guard, and the faults are all known
the one to the other. You are aware of your imperfections, unless you
are one of those self-conceited people who are quickly observant of
faults in others, but oblivious to faults in yourself; and now having
found out all of each others imperfections, forbear.
If the one be given to too much precision, and the other disorderly in
habits; if the one be spendthrift and the other oversaving; if the one
be loquacious, and the other reticent, forbear. Especially, if you
both have inflammable tempers, do not both get mad at once. Take turn
about! William Cowper put it well when he said:
"The kindest and the happiest pair
Will find occasion to forbear;
And something every day they live
To pity, and perhaps forgive."
V. Again: in order to your happiness, let there be no interfering with
each other's peculiar
RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS.
If you are a Baptist and your wife a Pedo-Baptist, do not go to
splashing water into each other's faces! If you are a Presbyterian and
your husband is a Methodist, when he shouts "Hallelujah!" do not get
nervous.
If you have strong denominational proclivities, one of you had better
go to one church, and the other had better go to another church; or,
surrendering some of your intensity on that subject, as in hundreds of
cases, come to some such church as the Brooklyn Tabernacle, where,
while we adhere to the fundamentals of the Gospel, we do not care a
rye straw for the infinitesimal differences between evangelical
denominations--putting one drop of water on the brow, if that is
enough baptism, and if not, then plunging the candidate clear out of
sight, if that is preferred--not caring whether you believe you have
been foreordained to be saved or not, if you are only saved; nor
whether you believe in the perseverance of the saints or not, if you
will only persevere; nor whether you prefer prayer by Episcopal
liturgy or extemporaneous supplication, if you only pray.
Do not let there be any religious contests across the breakfast table
or the tea table. It makes but little difference from what direction
you come toward the riven heart of Christ, if you only come up to the
riven heart. Yet, I know in many families there is constant picking at
opposite religious beliefs, and attempt at proselytism. You, the
father, fight for Episcopacy, and you, the mother, fight for
Presbyterianism, and your children will compromise the matter and be
Nothingarians!
VI. Again: I counsel you, in order to your domestic happiness, that
you
CULTIVATE EACH OTHER'S RELIGIOUS WELFARE.
This is a profoundly agitating thought to every fair-minded man and
woman. You live, together on earth; you want to live together forever.
You do not want ten, or twenty, or fifty years to end your
association, you want to take your companion into the kingdom of God
with you. If this subject is irritating in the household, it is
because you do not understand Christian stratagem.
Every Christian companion may take his or her companion into glory.
How? Ask God, and he will tell you how. Perhaps by occasional
religious remark. Perhaps by earnest prayer. Perhaps by a consistent
life. More probably by all these things combined. Paul put it
forcefully when he said: "How knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt
save thy husband? how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy
wife?" In this house, how many have been remarried for the skies!
It has become so much the general rule that when in my congregation,
as I often do, I find a family in which the wife is a Christian, and
the husband is not, I just say frankly to him: "Now you have got to
come in. You might just as well try to swim up against Niagara rapids
as against the tide of religious influence which in this church is
going to surge you into the kingdom of God. You must come in. You know
that your wife is right in this matter of religion. She may be quick
of temper, and you may sometimes lose your patience with her, but you
know she is better than you are, and you know when she dies she will
go as straight to heaven as a shot to a target.
"And, if to-day, on the way home, a vehicle should dash down the
street, and she should fall lifeless, with no opportunity for last
words, you might have a doubt about what would become of you, and a
doubt about what would become of the children, but you would have no
doubt about her eternal destiny. Somewhere under the flush of her
cheek, or under the pallor of her brow is the Lord's mark. She is your
wife, but she is God's child, and you are not jealous of that
relationship. You only wish that you yourself were a son of the Lord
Almighty. Come and have the matter settled. If I die before you, I
will not forget in the next world how you stood together here, but I
will expect both of you. You must come.
"I say it in all Christian love and emphasis, as a brother talks to a
brother. You must come. You have been united so long, you cannot
afford to have death divorce you. How long it is since you began the
struggle of life together! You have helped each other on the road, and
what you have done for each other God only knows. There have been
tedious sicknesses, and anxious watching, and here and there a grave,
short but very deep; and though the blossoms of the marriage day may
have scattered, and the lips that pronounced you one may have gone
into dust, you have through all these years been to each other true as
steel.
"Now, to-day, I am going to remarry you for heaven. This is the bridal
day of your soul's peace. Here is the marriage altar. Kneel side by
side, take the oath of eternal fidelity, clasp hands in a covenant
never to be broken. I pronounce you one on earth, I pronounce you one
for eternity. What God by His grace hath joined together, let not
earth or hell put asunder. Hark! I hear a humming in the air--an
anthem--a wedding march--organs celestial played upon by fingers
seraphic."
I do not think I ever read anything more beautiful and quaintly
pathetic than
COTTON MATHER'S DESCRIPTION
of the departure of his wife from earth to Heaven: "The black day
arrives. I had never seen so black a day in all the time of my
pilgrimage. The desire of my eyes is this day to be taken from me at
a stroke. Her death is lingering and painful. All the forenoon of this
day she was in the pangs of death, and sensible until the last minute
or two before her final expiration. I cannot remember the discourse
that passed between us, only her devout soul was full of satisfaction
about her going to a state of blessedness with the Lord Jesus Christ.
As far as my distress would permit, I studied to confirm her
satisfaction and consolation.
"When I saw to what a point of resignation I was called of the Lord, I
resolved, with His help, to glorify Him. So, two hours before she
expired, I knelt by her bedside and took into my hands that dear hand,
the dearest in the world, and solemnly and sincerely gave her up to
the Lord. I gently put her out of my hands and laid away her hand,
resolved that I would not touch it again. She afterward told me that
she signed and sealed my act of resignation, and though before that
she had called for me continually, after it she never asked for me any
more. She conversed much until near two in the afternoon. The last
sensible word she spoke was to her weeping father: 'Heaven, Heaven
will make amends for all!'"
Now let us be faithful in this relation of which I have been speaking.
Do you want to know
WHAT THE LORD THINKS OF IT?
Read the sixty-second chapter of Isaiah, where he says: "As the
bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over
thee." There is a wedding coming which will eclipse all the princely
and imperial weddings the world ever saw. It was a great day when
Napoleon took Josephine; it was a great day when Henry VIII. led Anne
Boleyn over the cloth of gold on the street, the cloth of gold
reaching up to the palace; it was a great day when the King of Spain
took Mercedes; but there will be a greater time when the Lord shall
take His bride, the Church, to Himself.
Long time ago they were affianced, but she has been down in the
wilderness. He has written her again and again, and the day of
marriage is fixed. She has sent word to Him. He has sent word to her.
But, oh! was there ever such a difference in estate? The King on the
one side, the bride of the wilderness, poor and persecuted, on the
other. The wealth of the universe on the one side, the obscurity of
the ages on the other. The pomp of heaven on the one side, the poverty
of earth on the other. But He will endow her with all His wealth, and
raise her to sit with Him on a throne forever.
Come, thou bridal morn of the ages! Come! and there shall be the
rumbling of great wheels, great chariot wheels down the sky, and there
shall be riders ahead and mounted cavalry behind, the conquerors of
heaven on white horses. Clear the way! A thousand trumpets blare.
"Behold! the bridegroom cometh: go ye out to meet Him."
Then the charioteers shall rein in their bounding steeds of fire, and
the King shall dismount from the chariot, and He shall take by the
hand the bride of the wilderness, all the crowded galleries of the
universe, the spectators. Ring all the wedding bells of heaven. The
King lifts the bride into the chariot and cries, "Drive on! drive up!"
and the clouds shall spread their cloth of gold for the procession,
and the twain shall go through the gates triumphant, and up the
streets, and then step into the palace at the banquet, where ten
thousand potentates and principalities and dominations, cherubic and
archangelic, with ten thousand gleaming and uplifted chalices, shall
celebrate the day when the King of Heaven and earth brings home His
bride from the wilderness. Make haste, my beloved. Be thou like to a
roe, or a young hart upon the mountains of spices.
MATRIMONIAL DISCORDS.
"Can two walk together, except they be agreed?"--AMOS 3:3.
A church within a church, a republic within a republic, a world within
a world, is spelled by four letters--Home! If things go right there,
they go right everywhere; if things go wrong there, they go wrong
everywhere. The door-sill of the dwelling-house is the foundation of
Church and State. A man never gets higher than his own garret or lower
than his own cellar. In other words, domestic life overarches and
undergirds all other life. The highest House of Congress is the
domestic circle; the rocking-chair in the nursery is higher than a
throne. George Washington commanded the forces of the United States,
but Mary Washington commanded George. Chrysostom's mother made his pen
for him. If a man should start out and run seventy years in a straight
line he could not get out from under the shadow of his own
mantelpiece. I therefore talk to you this morning about a matter of
infinite and eternal moment when I speak of your home.
THE SOCIAL BALANCE.
As individuals we are fragments. God makes the race in part, and then
he gradually puts us together. What I lack, you make up; what you
lack, I make up; our deficits and surpluses of character being the
cog-wheels in the great social mechanism. One person has the patience,
another has the courage, another has the placidity, another has the
enthusiasm; that which is lacking in one is made up by another, or
made up by all. Buffaloes in herds, grouse in broods, quail in flocks,
the human race in circles. God has most beautifully arranged this. It
is in this way that he balances society; this conservative and that
radical keeping things even. Every ship must have its mast, cutwater,
taffrail, ballast. Thank God, then, for Princeton and Andover, for the
opposites.
I have no more right to blame a man for being different from me than a
driving-wheel has a right to blame the iron shaft that holds it to the
centre. John Wesley balances Calvin's Institutes. A cold thinker gives
to Scotland the strong bones of theology; Dr. Guthrie clothes them
with a throbbing heart and warm flesh. The difficulty is that we are
not satisfied with just the work that God has given us to do. The
water-wheel wants to come inside the mill and grind the grist, and
the hopper wants to go out and dabble in the water. Our usefulness and
the welfare of society depend upon our staying in just the place that
God has put us, or intended we should occupy.
A RELIC OF EDEN.
For more compactness and that we may be more useful we are gathered in
still smaller circles in the home group. And there you have the same
varieties again; brothers, sisters, husband and wife; all different in
temperaments and tastes. It is fortunate that it should be so. If the
husband be all impulse, the wife must be all prudence. If one sister
be sanguine in her temperament, the other must be lymphatic. Mary and
Martha are necessities. There will be no dinner for Christ if there be
no Martha; there will be no audience for Jesus if there be no Mary.
The home organization is most beautifully constructed. Eden has gone;
the bowers are all broken down; the animals that Adam stroked with his
hand that morning when they came up to get their names have since shot
forth tusk and sting and growled, panther at panther; in mid-air iron
beaks plunge till with clotted wing and eyeless sockets the twain come
whirling down from under the sun in blood and fire. Eden has gone, but
there is just one little fragment left. It floated down on the River
Hiddekel out of Paradise. It is the marriage institution. It does
not, as at the beginning, take away from man a rib. Now it is an
addition of ribs.
THE HOME ASSAULTED.
This institution of marriage has been defamed in our day, and
influences are abroad trying to turn this earth into a Turkish harem
or a great Salt Lake City. While the pulpits have been comparatively
silent, novels--their cheapness only equalled by their nastiness--are
trying to educate, have taken upon themselves to educate, this nation
in regard to holy marriage, which makes or breaks for time and
eternity. Oh, this is not a mere question of residence or wardrobe! It
is a question charged with gigantic joy or sorrow, with heaven or
hell. Alas for this new dispensation of George Sands! Alas for the
mingling of the nightshade with the marriage garlands! Alas for the
venom of adders spit into the tankards! Alas for the white frosts of
eternal death that kill the orange blossoms! The Gospel of Jesus
Christ is to assert what is right and to assert what is wrong.
THE ASSAULT OF THE SORDID.
Attempt has been made to take the marriage institution, which was
intended for the happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a
mere commercial enterprise; an exchange of houses and lands and
equipage; a business partnership of two, stuffed up with the stories
of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness and feminine
angelhood. The two after a while have roused up to find that, instead
of the paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van
Amburgh's menagerie, filled with tigers and wild-cats. Twenty thousand
divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution that
France ever saw. It was only the first course in that banquet of hell;
and I tell you what you know as well as I do, that wrong notions on
the subject of Christian marriage are the cause at this day of more
moral outrage before God and man than any other cause.
There are some things that I want to bring before you. I know there
are those of you who have had homes set up for a great many years; and
then there are those here who have just established their home. They
have only been in it a few months or a few years. Then there are those
who will, after awhile, set up for themselves a home, and it is right
that I should speak out upon these themes.
THE BENEFICENT GUEST.
My first counsel to you is, have Jesus in your new home, if it be a
new home, and let Him who was a guest at Bethany be in your
household; let the divine blessing drop upon your every hope and plan
and expectation. Those young people who begin with God end with
heaven. Have on your right hand the engagement ring of the divine
affection. If one of you be a Christian, let that one take a Bible and
read a few verses in the evening-time, and then kneel down and commend
yourselves to Him who setteth the solitary in families. I want to tell
you that the destroying angel passes by without touching or entering
the door-post sprinkled with the blood of the everlasting covenant.
Why is it that in some families they never get along, and in others
they always get along well? I have watched such cases, and have come
to a conclusion. In the first instance, nothing seemed to go
pleasantly, and after awhile came devastation, domestic disaster or
estrangement. Why? They started wrong! In the other case, although
there were hardships and trials, and some things that had to be
explained, still things went on pleasantly until the very last. Why?
They started right!
FORBEARANCE NEEDED.
My advice to you in your home is to exercise to the very last
possibility of your nature the law of forbearance. Prayers in the
household will not make up for everything. Some of the best people in
the world are the hardest to get along with. There are people who
stand up in prayer-meetings and pray like angels, who at home are
uncompromising and cranky. You may not have everything just as you
want it. Sometimes it will be the duty of the husband, and sometimes
of the wife, to yield; but both stand punctiliously on your rights,
and you will have a Waterloo with no Blucher coming up at nightfall to
decide the conflict.
A GRANDFATHER'S APOLOGY.
Never be ashamed to apologize when you have done wrong in domestic
affairs. Let that be a law of your household. The best thing I ever
heard of my grandfather, whom I never saw, was this: that once, having
unrighteously rebuked one of his children, he himself having lost his
patience, and, perhaps, having been misinformed of the child's doings,
found out his mistake, and in the evening of the same day gathered all
his family together, and said: "Now I have one explanation to make,
and one thing to say. Thomas, this morning, I rebuked you very
unfairly. I am very sorry for it. I rebuked you in the presence of the
whole family, and now I ask your forgiveness in their presence." It
must have taken some courage to do that. It was right, was it not?
Never be ashamed to apologize for domestic inaccuracy. Find out the
points; what are the weak points, if I may call them so, of your
companion, and then stand aloof from them.
Do not carry the fire of your temper too near the gunpowder. If the
wife be easily fretted by disorder in the household, let the husband
be careful where he throws his slippers. If the husband come home from
the store with his patience all exhausted, do not let the wife
unnecessarily cross his temper; but both stand up for your rights, and
I will promise the everlasting sound of the war-whoop. Your life will
be spent in making up, and marriage will be to you an unmitigated
curse. Cowper said:
"The kindest and the happiest pair
Will find occasion to forbear;
And something every day they live,
To pity, and perhaps forgive."
I advise, also, that you make your chief pleasure circle around about
that home. It is unfortunate when it is otherwise. If the husband
spend the most of his nights away from home, of choice, and not of
necessity, he is not the head of the household; he is only the
cashier. If the wife throw the cares of the household in the servant's
lap, and then spend five nights of the week at the opera or theatre,
she may clothe her children with satins and laces and ribbons that
would confound a French milliner, but they are orphans. Oh, it is sad
when a child has to say its prayers alone because mother has gone off
to the evening entertainment! In India they bring children and throw
them to the crocodiles, and it seems very cruel; but the jaws of New
York and Brooklyn dissipation are swallowing down more little children
to-day than all the monsters that ever crawled upon the banks of the
Ganges!
A GODLESS MOTHER'S GRIEF.
I have seen the sorrow of a godless mother on the death of a child she
had neglected. It was not so much grief that she felt from the fact
that the child was dead as the fact that she had neglected it. She
said: "If I had only watched over and cared for the child, I know God
would not have taken it." The tears came not; it was a dry, blistering
tempest--a scorching simoon of the desert. When she wrung her hands it
seemed as if she would twist her fingers from their sockets; when she
seized her hair it seemed as if she had, in wild terror, grasped a
coiling serpent with her right hand.
No tears! Comrades of the little one came in and wept over the coffin;
neighbors came in, and the moment they saw the still face of the child
the shower broke. No tears for her. God gives tears as the summer rain
to the parched soul; but in all the universe the driest and hottest,
the most scorching and consuming thing is a mother's heart if she has
neglected her child, when once it is dead. God may forgive her, but
she will never forgive herself. The memory will sink the eyes deeper
into the sockets, and pinch the face, and whiten the hair, and eat up
the heart with vultures that will not be satisfied, forever plunging
deeper their iron beaks. Oh, you wanderers from your home, go back to
your duty! The brightest flowers in all the earth are those which grow
in the garden of a Christian household, clambering over the porch of a
Christian home.
MATRIMONIAL CONGENIALITY.
I advise you also to cultivate sympathy of occupation. Sir James
Mackintosh, one of the most eminent and elegant men that ever lived,
while standing at the very height of his eminence, said to a great
company of scholars: "My wife made me." The wife ought to be the
advising partner in every firm. She ought to be interested in all the
losses and gains of shop and store. She ought to have a right--she has
a right--to know everything. If a man goes into a business transaction
that he dare not tell his wife of, you may depend that he is on the
way either to bankruptcy or moral ruin. There may be some things which
he does not wish to trouble his wife with; but if he dare not tell
her, he is on the road to discomfiture.
On the other hand, the husband ought to be sympathetic with the wife's
occupation. It is no easy thing to keep house. Many a woman that could
have endured martyrdom as well as Margaret, the Scotch girl, has
actually been worn out by house management. There are a thousand
martyrs of the kitchen. It is very annoying, after the vexations of
the day, around the stove or the table, or in the nursery or parlor,
to have your husband say: "You know nothing about trouble; you ought
to be in the store half an hour." Sympathy of occupation!
If the husband's work cover him with the soot of the furnace or the
odors of leather or soap factories, let not the wife be easily
disgusted at the begrimed hands or unsavory aroma. Your gains are one,
your interests are one, your losses are one; lay hold of the work of
life with both hands. Four hands to fight the battles; four eyes to
watch for the danger; four shoulders on which to carry the trials. It
is a very sad thing when the painter has a wife who does not like
pictures. It is a very sad thing for a pianist when she has a husband
who does not like music.
GENTEEL BUSINESS.
It is a very sad thing when a wife is not suited unless her husband
has what is called a "genteel business." So far as I understand a
"genteel business," it is something to which a man goes at ten o'clock
in the morning, and from which he comes home at two or three o'clock
in the afternoon, and gets a large amount of money for doing nothing.
That is, I believe, a "genteel business;" and there has been many a
wife who has made the mistake of not being satisfied until the husband
has given up the tanning of the hides, or the turning of the
banisters, or the building of the walls, and put himself in circles
where he has nothing to do but smoke cigars and drink wine, and get
himself into habits that upset him, going down in the maelstrom,
taking his wife and children with him.
There are a good many trains running from earth to destruction. They
start all the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night. There
are the freight trains; they go very slowly and very heavily; and
there are the accommodation trains going on toward destruction, and
they stop very often and let a man get out when he wants to. But
genteel idleness is an express train; Satan is the stoker, and Death
is the engineer; and though one may come out in front of it and swing
the red flag of "danger," or the lantern of God's Word, it makes just
one shot into perdition, coming down the embankment with a shout and a
wail and a shriek--crash, crash! There are two classes of people sure
of destruction: First, those who have nothing to do; secondly, those
who have something to do, but are too lazy or too proud to do it.
LOVE TO PRESIDE.
I have one more word of advice to give to those who would have a happy
home, and that is, let love preside in it. When your behavior in the
domestic circle becomes a mere matter of calculation; when the caress
you give is merely the result of deliberate study of the position you
occupy, happiness lies stark dead on the hearthstone. When the
husband's position as head of the household is maintained by loudness
of voice, by strength of arm, by fire of temper, the republic of
domestic bliss has become a despotism that neither God nor man will
abide. Oh, ye who promised to love each other at the altar, how dare
you commit perjury? Let no shadow of suspicion come on your affection.
It is easier to kill that flower than it is to make it live again. The
blast from hell that puts out that light leaves you in the blackness
of darkness forever.
A HOUSE NOT A HOME.
Here are a man and wife; they agree in nothing else, but they agree
they will have a home. They will have a splendid house, and they think
that if they have a house they will have a home. Architects make the
plan, and the mechanics execute it; the house to cost one hundred
thousand dollars. It is done. The carpets are spread, lights are
hoisted, curtains are hung, cards of invitation sent out. The horses
in gold-plated harness prance at the gate; guests come in and take
their places; the flute sounds; the dancers go up and down; and with
one grand whirl the wealth and the fashion and the mirth of the great
town wheel amidst the pictured walls.
Ha! this is happiness. Float it on the smoking viands; sound it in the
music; whirl it in the dance; cast it on the snow of sculpture; sound
it up the brilliant stairway; flash it in chandeliers! Happiness,
indeed! Let us build on the centre of the parlor floor a throne to
Happiness; let all the guests, when they come in, bring their flowers
and pearls and diamonds, and throw them on this pyramid, and let it be
a throne; and then let Happiness, the Queen, mount the throne, and we
will stand around and, all chalices lifted, we will say: "Drink, O
Queen! live forever!"
LIGHTS OUT.
But the guests depart, the flutes are breathless, the last clash of
the impatient hoofs is heard in the distance, and the twain of the
household come back to see the Queen of Happiness on the throne amid
the parlor floor. But, alas! as they come back the flowers have faded,
the sweet odors have become the smell of a charnel-house, and instead
of the Queen of Happiness there sits there the gaunt form of Anguish,
with bitten lip and sunken eye, and ashes in her hair.
The romp and joyous step of the dancers who have left seems rumbling
yet, like jarring thunders that quake the floor and rattle the glasses
of the feast, rim to rim. The spilled wine on the floor turns into
blood. The wreaths of plush have become wriggling reptiles. Terrors
catch tangled in the canopy that overhangs the couch. A strong gust of
wind comes through the hall and the drawing-room and the bed-chamber,
in which all the lights go out. And from the lips of the wine-beakers
come the words: "Happiness is not in us!" And the arches respond: "It
is not in us!" And the silenced instruments of music, thrummed on by
invisible fingers, answer: "Happiness is not in us!" And the frozen
lips of Anguish break open, and, seated on the throne of wilted
flowers, she strikes her bony hands together, and groans: "It is not
in me!"
HAPPINESS IN POVERTY.
That very night a clerk with a salary of a thousand dollars a
year--only one thousand--goes to his home, set up three months ago,
just after the marriage-day. Love meets him at the door; love sits
with him at the table; love talks over the work of the day; love takes
down the Bible, and reads of Him who came our souls to save; and they
kneel, and while they are kneeling--right in that plain room, on that
plain carpet--the angels of God build a throne, not out of flowers
that perish and fade away, but out of garlands of heaven, wreath on
top of wreath, amaranth on amaranth, until the throne is done. Then
the harps of God sounded, and suddenly there appeared one who mounted
the throne, with eye so bright and brow so fair that the twain knew it
was Christian Love. And they knelt at the throne, and, putting one
hand on each head, she blessed them, and said: "Happiness is with me!"
And that throne of celestial bloom withered not with the passing
years; and the queen left not the throne till one day the married pair
felt stricken in years--felt themselves called away, and knew not
which way to go, and the queen bounded from the throne, and said:
"Follow me, and I will show you the way up to the realm of everlasting
love." And so they went up to sing songs of love, and walk on
pavements of love, and to live together in mansions of love, and to
rejoice forever in the truth that God is love.
HOTELS VERSUS HOMES.
"And brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the
morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to
the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever
thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."--LUKE
10:34, 35.
This is the good Samaritan paying the hotel bill of a man who had been
robbed and almost killed by bandits. The good Samaritan had found the
unfortunate on a lonely, rocky road, where, to this very day,
depredations are sometimes committed upon travelers, and had put the
injured man into the saddle, while this merciful and well-to-do man
had walked till they got to the hotel, and the wounded man was put to
bed and cared for. It must have been a very superior hotel in its
accommodations, for, though in the country, the landlord was paid at
the rate of what in our country would be four or five dollars a day, a
penny being then a day's wages, and the two pennies paid in this case
about two days' wages. Moreover, it was one of those kind-hearted
landlords who are wrapped up in the happiness of their guests, because
the good Samaritan leaves the poor wounded fellow to his entire care,
promising that when he came that way again he would pay all the bills
until the invalid got well.
THE VALUE OF HOTELS.
Hotels and boarding-houses are necessities. In very ancient times they
were unknown, because the world had comparatively few inhabitants, who
were not much given to travel, and private hospitality met all the
wants of sojourners, as when Abraham rushed out at Mamre to invite the
three men to sit down to a dinner of veal; as when the people were
positively commanded to be given to hospitality; as in many of the
places in the East these ancient customs are practiced to-day. But we
have now hotels presided over by good landlords, and boarding-houses
presided over by excellent host or hostess, in all neighborhoods,
villages and cities, and it is our congratulation that those of our
land surpass all other lands. They rightly become the permanent
residences of many people, such as those who are without families,
such as those whose business keeps them migratory, such as those who
ought not, for various reasons of health or peculiarity of
circumstances, take upon themselves the cares of housekeeping.
QUEENLY CATERERS.
Many a man falling sick in one of these boarding-houses or hotels has
been kindly watched and nursed; and by the memory of her own
sufferings and losses the lady at the head of such a house has done
all that a mother could do for a sick child, and the slumberless eye
of God sees and appreciates her sacrifices in behalf of the stranger.
Among the most marvelous cases of patience and Christian fidelity are
many of those who keep boarding-houses, enduring without resentment
the unreasonable demands of their guests for expensive food and
attentions for which they are not willing to pay an equivalent--a lot
of cranky men and women who are not worthy to tie the shoe of their
queenly caterer. The outrageous way in which boarders sometimes act to
their landlords and landladies show that these critical guests had bad
early rearing, and that in the making-up of their natures all that
constitutes the gentleman and lady were left out. Some of the most
princely men and some of the most elegant women that I know of to-day
keep hotels and boarding-houses.
But one of the great evils of this day is found in the fact that a
large population of our towns and cities are giving up and have given
up their homes and taken apartments, that they may have more freedom
from domestic duties and more time for social life, and because they
like the whirl of publicity better than the quiet and privacy of a
residence they can call their own. The lawful use of these hotels and
boarding-houses is for most people while they are in transitu: but as
a terminus they are in many cases demoralization, utter and complete.
That is the point at which families innumerable have begun to
disintegrate. There never has been a time when so many families,
healthy and abundantly able to support and direct homes of their own,
have struck tent and taken permanent abode in these public
establishments. It is an evil wide as Christendom, and by voice and
through the newspaper press I utter warning and burning protest, and
ask Almighty God to bless the word, whether in the hearing or reading.
PROMOTERS OF GOSSIP.
In these public caravanseries the demon of gossip is apt to get full
sway. All the boarders run daily the gauntlet of general
inspection--how they look when they come down in the morning and when
they get in at night, and what they do for a living, and whom they
receive as guests in their rooms, and what they wear, and what they do
not wear, and how they eat, and what they eat, and how much they eat,
and how little they eat. If a man proposes in such a place to be
isolated and reticent and alone, they will begin to guess about him:
Who is he? Where did he come from? How long is he going to stay? Has
he paid his board? How much does he pay? Perhaps he has committed some
crime and does not want it to be known; there must be something wrong
about him, or he would speak.
The whole house goes into the detective business. They must find out
about him. They must find out about him right away. If he leave his
door unlocked by accident he will find that his rooms have been
inspected, his trunk explored, his letters folded differently from the
way they were folded when he put them away. Who is he? is the
question, asked with intenser interest, until the subject has become a
monomania. The simple fact is, that he is nobody in particular, but
minds his own business. The best landlords and landladies cannot
sometimes hinder their places from becoming
A PANDEMONIUM
of whisperers, and reputations are torn to tatters, and evil
suspicions are aroused, and scandals started, and the parliament of
the family is blown to atoms by some Guy Fawkes who was not caught in
time, as was his English predecessor of gunpowdery reputation.
The reason is that while in private homes families have so much to
keep them busy, in these promiscuous and multitudinous residences
there are so many who have nothing to do, and that always makes
mischief. They gather in each other's rooms and spend hours in
consultation about others. If they had to walk a half mile before they
got to the willing ear of some listener to detraction they would get
out of breath before reaching there, and not feel in full glow of
animosity or slander, or might, because of the distance, not go at
all. But rooms 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 are on the same corridor, and
when one carrion crow goes "Caw! Caw!" all the other crows hear it and
flock together over the same carcass. "Oh, I have heard something
rich! Sit down and let me tell you all about it." And the first guffaw
increases the gathering, and it has to be told all over again, and as
they separate each carries a spark from the altar of Gab to some other
circle, until from the coal-heaver in the cellar to the maid in the
top room of the garret all are aware of the defamation, and that
evening all who leave the house will bear it to other houses, until
autumnal fires sweeping across Illinois prairies are less raging and
swift than that flame of consuming reputation blazing across the
village or city.
Those of us who were brought up in the country know that the
old-fashioned hatching of eggs in the hay-mow required four or five
weeks of brooding, but there are new modes of hatching by machinery,
which take less time and do the work in wholesale. So, while the
private home may brood into life an occasional falsity, and take a
long time to do it, many of the boarding-houses and family hotels
afford a swifter and more multitudinous style of moral incubation, and
one old gossip will get off the nest after one hour's brooding,
clucking a flock of thirty lies after her, each one picking up its
little worm of juicy regalement. It is no advantage to hear too much
about your neighbors, for your time will be so much occupied in taking
care of their faults that you will have no time to look after your
own. And while you are pulling the chickweed out of their garden yours
will get all overgrown with horse-sorrel and mullen stalks.
A WRONG TO CHILDREN.
One of the worst damages that comes from the herding of so many people
into boarding-houses and family hotels is inflicted upon children. It
is only another way of bringing them up on the commons. While you have
your own private house you can, for the most part, control their
companionship and their whereabouts; but by twelve years of age in
these public resorts they will have picked up all the bad things that
can be furnished by the prurient minds of dozens of people. They will
overhear blasphemies, and see quarrels, and get precocious in sin,
and what the bartender does not tell them the porter or hostler or
bell-boy will.
Beside that, the children will go out into this world without the
restraining, anchoring, steadying and all-controlling memory of a
home. From that none of us who have been blessed of such memory have
escaped. It grips a man for eighty years, if he lives so long. It
pulls him back from doors into which he otherwise would enter. It
smites him with contrition in the very midst of his dissipations. As
the fish already surrounded by
THE LONG WIDE NET
swim out to sea, thinking they can go as far as they please, and with
gay toss of silvery scale they defy the sportsman on the beach, and
after a while the fishermen begin to draw in the net, hand over hand,
and hand over hand, and it is a long while before the captured fins
begin to feel the net, and then they dart this way and that, hoping to
get out, but find themselves approaching the shore, and are brought up
to the very feet of the captors, so the memory of an early home
sometimes seems to relax and let men out further and further from God
and further and further from shore--five years, ten years, twenty
years, thirty years; but some day they find an irresistible mesh
drawing them back, and they are compelled to retreat from their
prodigality and wandering; and though they make desperate effort to
escape the impression, and try to dive deeper down in sin, after a
while are brought clear back and held upon the Rock of Ages.
If it be possible, O father and mother! let your sons and daughters go
out into the world under the semi-omnipotent memory of a good, pure
home. About your two or three rooms in a boarding-house or a family
hotel you can cast no such glorious sanctity. They will think of these
public caravanseries as an early stopping place, malodorous with old
victuals, coffees perpetually steaming, and meats in everlasting stew
or broil, the air surcharged with carbonic acid, and corridors along
which drunken boarders come staggering at one o'clock in the morning,
rapping at the door till the affrighted wife lets them in. Do not be
guilty of the sacrilege or blasphemy of calling such a place a home.
WHAT A HOME IS.
A home is four walls enclosing one family with identity of interest,
and a privacy from outside inspection so complete that it is a world
in itself, no one entering except by permission--bolted and barred and
chained against all outside inquisitiveness. The phrase so often used
in law books and legal circles is mightily suggestive--every man's
house is his castle. As much so as though it had drawbridge,
portcullis, redoubt, bastion and armed turret. Even the officer of the
law may not enter to serve a writ, except the door be voluntarily
opened unto him; burglary, or the invasion of it, a crime so offensive
that the law clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it. Unless
it be necessary to stay for longer or shorter time in family hotel or
boarding-house--and there are thousands of instances in which it is
necessary, as I showed you at the beginning--unless in this
exceptional case, let neither wife nor husband consent to such
permanent residence.
HAZARDOUS TO MORALS.
The probability is that the wife will have to divide her husband's
time with public smoking or reading room, or with some coquettish
spider in search of unwary flies; and if you do not entirely lose your
husband it will be because he is divinely protected from the disasters
that have whelmed thousands of husbands with as good intentions as
yours. Neither should the husband, without imperative reason, consent
to such a life unless he is sure his wife can withstand the temptation
of social dissipation which sweeps across such places with the force
of the Atlantic Ocean when driven by a September equinox. Many wives
give up their homes for these public residences so that they may give
their entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees,
and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and
round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots
off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and
in the other a soul.
THE LARES AND PENATES.
Beside this there is an assiduous accumulation of little things around
the private home which in the aggregate make a great attraction, while
the denizen of one of these public residences is apt to say: "What is
the use? I have no place to keep them if I should take them."
Mementoes, bric-a-brac, curiosities, quaint chair or cosy lounge,
upholsteries, pictures, and a thousand things that accrete in a home
are discarded or neglected because there is no homestead in which to
arrange them. And yet they are the case in which the pearl of domestic
happiness is set. You can never become as attached to the appointments
of a boarding-house or family hotel as to those things that you can
call your own, and are associated with the different members of your
household, or with scenes of thrilling import in your domestic
history. Blessed is that home in which for a whole lifetime they have
been gathering until every figure in the carpet, and every panel of
the door, and every casement of the window has a chirography of its
own, speaking out something about father or mother, or son or
daughter, or friend that was with us a while. What a sacred place it
becomes when one can say: "In that room such a one was born; in that
bed such a one died; in that chair I sat on the night I heard such a
one had received a great public honor; by that stool my child knelt
for her last evening prayer; here I sat to greet my son as he came
back from a sea voyage; that was father's cane; that was mother's
rocking chair." What a joyful and pathetic congress of reminiscences!
HOSPITALITY CURTAILED.
The public residence of hotel and boarding-house abolishes the grace
of hospitality. Your guest does not want to come to such a table. No
one wants to run such a gauntlet of acute and merciless
hyper-criticism. Unless you have a home of your own you will not be
able to exercise the best rewarded of all the graces. For exercise of
this grace what blessing came to the Shunamite in the restoration of
her son to life because she entertained Elisha, and to the widow of
Zarephath in the perpetual oil well of the miraculous cruise because
she fed a hungry prophet, and to Rahab in the preservation of her life
at the demolition of Jericho because she entertained the spies and to
Laban in the formation of an interesting family relation because of
his entertainment of Jacob, and to Lot in his rescue from the
destroyed city because of his entertainment of the angels, and to Mary
and Martha and Zaccheus in spiritual blessing because they entertained
Christ, and to Publius in the island of Melita in the healing of his
father because of the entertainment of Paul drenched from the
shipwreck, and of innumerable houses throughout Christendom upon which
have come blessings from generation to generation because their doors
swung easily open in the enlarging, ennobling, irradiating, and divine
grace of hospitality. I do not know what your experience has been, but
I have had men and women visiting at my house who left a benediction
on every room--in the blessing they asked at the table, in the prayer
they offered at the family altar, in the good advice they gave the
children, in the gospelization that looked out from every lineament of
their countenances; and their departure was the sword of bereavement.
The Queen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark had a royal
CUP OF TEN CURVES,
or lips, each one having on it the name of the distinguished person
who had drank from it. And that cup which we offer to others in
Christian hospitality, though it be of the plainest earthenware, is a
royal cup, and God can read on all its sides the names of those who
have taken from it refreshment. But all this is impossible unless you
have a home of your own. It is the delusion as to what is necessary
for a home that hinders so many from establishing one. Thirty rooms
are not necessary, nor twenty, nor fifteen, nor ten, nor five, nor
three. In the right way plant a table, and couch, and knife and fork,
and a cup, and a chair, and you can raise a young paradise. Just start
a home, on however small a scale, and it will grow. When King Cyrus
was invited to dine with an humble friend the king made the one
condition of his coming that the only dish be one loaf of bread, and
the most imperial satisfactions have sometimes banqueted on the
plainest fare.
Do not be caught in the delusion of many thousands in postponing a
home until they can have an expensive one. That idea is the devil's
trap that catches men and women innumerable who will never have any
home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people.
Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the
people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small
homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar.
In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman
to have a home. Morals and civilization and religion demand it.
SMALL HOMES NEEDED
We want done all over this land what George Peabody and Lady
Burdett-Coutts did in England, and some of the large manufacturers of
this country have done for the villages and cities, in building small
houses at cheap rents, so that the middle classes can have separate
homes. They are the only class not provided for. The rich have their
palaces, and the poor have their poorhouses, and criminals have their
jails; but what about the honest middle classes, who are able and
willing to work, and yet have small income? Let the capitalists,
inspired of God and pure patriotism, rise and build whole streets of
small residences. The laborer may have, at the close of the day, to
walk or ride further than is desirable to reach it, but when he gets
to his destination in the eventide he will find something worthy of
being called by that glorious and impassioned and heaven-descended
word, "home."
SOMETHING TO SAVE FOR.
Young married man, as soon as you can buy such a place, even if you
have to put on it a mortgage reaching from base to cap-stone. The
much abused mortgage, which is ruin to a reckless man, to one prudent
and provident is the beginning of a competency and a fortune, for the
reason he will not be satisfied until he has paid it off, and all the
household are put on stringent economies until then. Deny yourself all
superfluities and all luxuries until you can say: "Everything in this
house is mine, thank God!--every timber, every brick, every foot of
plumbing, every door-sill." Do not have your children born in a
boarding-house, and do not yourself be buried from one. Have a place
where your children can shout and sing and romp without being
overhauled for the racket. Have a kitchen where you can do something
toward the reformation of evil cookery and the lessening of this
nation of dyspeptics. As
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