If two souls are happily mated, there is no reason why either should live in or refer to the past. Their Eden is in the present and the future of what may be and not what has been. The man or woman should be sacredly silent about the dead past, unless there is some person or something which sooner or later may rise to bring darkness or death. The Bible basis of marriage is a love which takes for better or worse the heart which it calls its own. People ought not to marry unless they are so devoted to each other that any later knowledge of what either may have been or done would make no difference. Man’s inhumanity to woman is often earthly, selfish and devilish. Women are naturally and generally better than men. If they err, it is usually the man’s fault. The average young man is fortunate to secure any girl to live with him as his wife. Keep still and ask no questions is the wise way. There is no double moral standard for speech or silence for man or woman. At the marriage altar, heaven demands no more of the woman than of the man. That a woman should tell the past to a man who insists, though it is none of his business, or that she should persist in confessing to him when he does not care to hear it, is a piece of folly of which some women are guilty. Where ignorance is bliss “’tis folly to be wise.” After marriage it will do no good to tell what you said and did before. There are many homes now happy, as if made under the wings of the angels, whose members at one time left the paradise of innocence and wandered beneath a roofless world. Love is blind. A true and genuine lover does not want to hear a girl’s past; and if he did hear it from her own or another’s lips, it would make no difference to him. If any one is to tell let it be the man, for usually it is the woman and not he who runs the risk of a past. Let the man confess who places the material above the mental and moral and thinks of a wife as a cheap luxury, and of home as a dry-dock of repairs. No matter how greatly discrowned, a woman may be recrowned. With her, heaven is in the future and not in any past, she may serve, give, work and pray with the love that is the crown jewel in her diadem. The sweetheart who is willing to be a wife is not man’s inferior or superior, but equal in personal equivalent. The mere accident or providence of sex does not entitle a man to any special privileged of conduct before or after he is husband. Man’s character is judged by his estimate of women. Such a poem as Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” or Goldsmith’s “Folly” would be impossible if men remembered not to act the part of Faust to Margaret.