loses all her divinity, and pines away, and becomes what I care not to name; and the world—whose wisdom is folly—sanctions all this. It calls it prudence, foresight. A man has no business to marry till he can keep a wife, is the cuckoo cry; which would have some meaning if a wife was a horse or a dog, and not an answer to a human need, and an essential to success in life. The world forgets that man is not an automaton, but a being fearfully and wonderfully framed. No machine, but a lyre responsive to the breath of every passing passion: now fevered with pleasure; now toiling for gold; anon seeking to build up a lofty fame; and that the more eager and passionate and daring he is—the more eagle is his eye, and the loftier his aim, the more he needs woman—the comforter and the helpmeet—by his side. Our fathers did not ignore this, and they succeeded. Because the wife preserved them from the temptations of life; because she, with her words and looks of love, assisted them to bear the burdens and fight the battles of life; because she stood by her husband’s side as his helpmeet; bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh; soothing each sorrow; aiding each upward aim: it was thus they became great; and it is because we do not thus, we pale before them. It is not good for man to be alone. Man has tried to disobey the divine law, and lived alone; and what has been the result?—even when tried by men of superior sanctity, as in the case of the Romish Church, has the world gained in happiness or morality? I trow not. Take the limited experience of our own age, and fathers and mothers know, to their bitter cost, I am right. The manhood, brave and generous, much of it wrecked in our great cities, will bear me out. But matrimony is more than this. It spite of the hard matter-of-fact, sceptical, and therefore sensual character of the passing day, will it not be confessed that the union of man and woman, as husband and wife, is the greatest earthly need, and is followed by the greatest earthly good? Unhappy marriages there may be; imprudent ones there may be; but such are not the rule; and very properly our legislators have agreed to give relief in such cases. “Nature never did betray the soul that loved her;” and nature tells men and women to marry. Just as the young man is entering upon life—just as he comes to independence and man’s estate—just as the crisis of his being is to be solved, and it is to be seen whether he decide with the good, and the great, and the true, or whether he sink and be lost for ever, Matrimony gives him ballast and a right impulse. Of course it can’t make of a fool a philosopher; but it can save a fool from being foolish. War with nature and she takes a sure revenge. Tell a young man not to have an attachment that is virtuous, and he will have one that is vicious. Virtuous love—the honest love of a man for the woman he is about to marry, gives him an anchor for his