CHAPTER IV. MARRIAGE. WE reserve this kind of friendship for separate treatment; for it is the best and most important of all. Men make or mar themselves by marriage. So do women. We are writing this chapter for both sexes. Each must choose out what is appropriate. We shall not always say whether we write Most sound for a young man or a young woman. advice on this subject is equally important and applicable to both. If the wooing is on the man's side, choice ought to be equally on both sides. To accept an offer is as serious a piece of business as to make one. If any language on this subject seems to imply more, it is because the man has certain active responsibilities which do not belong to the woman. But it would be a fatal blunder to suppose that marriage is therefore a more important and solemn engagement to one than to the other. One of the responsibilities belonging specially to the man is the provision of ways and means. Till a man has a prospect of maintaining a wife in tolerable comfort he has no right to bind her by an engagement. Let her be free. A common understanding is, generally speaking, much more satisfactory than slow years of engagement. If the young lady takes advantage of her freedom to flirt, or to marry another, it is evident that her affections were never fully engaged. The elasticity of an understanding is in such a case better for both parties than vows made to be broken. We are not advocating such misleading things as understandings. They are often fruitful of misunderstandings, and should be avoided. A man's mind had better not be turned earnestly to marriage till he begins to see his way in business. Let him keep his own heart free, till he discovers whether he can offer a home as well as a hand to the woman of his choice. To avoid imprudent marriages, let the young beware of imprudent understandings and engagements. In order to a happy marriage the following things, amongst others, are necessary: (1) Common consecration to Christ; (2) similarity of education and tastes; (3) love; (4) and a comfortable home, I will begin at the last and lowest thing of all. I am not writing for princesses, or for lords and ladies, but for those who are content with homely ways, and who, if they are to marry at all, must do so with the determination to practise frugality. If you want to be happy, see to it that both you and your future wife are content with humble beginnings. A good wife will be willing and anxious to share the early struggles as well as the later successes of her husband. She will not want to sit in her stiff bridal dress, on brand new furniture, doing a little crochet work all the year round. She will be ready to be a fellow-worker, in some shape or form. Many young couples begin too ambitiously. They should take the lowest seat at first, and they would not fail to rise in life. They could at least hardly have the humiliation of falling. There is a happy mean between squalor and baseness on the one hand, and pretentiousness and display on the other. A young man should ask himself the plain question as to whether he can furnish a house, before he puts another and a far more serious question to the lady of his affections." Furnish on the hire system!" What an abomination this is! You bring your wife to a house which is not your own. The table off which you eat your first D |