Happy, happy indeed if you seek no other reward but the artist's joy in his work and know that to be your glory and your recompense. It is well, that there should be priests appointed to bear such messages to us from time to time as we rest from our toil; to bring us face to face with the inner life. But there are special occasions in these passing years of ours, when the ideal bearings of life come home to us with peculiar force and when we require the priest to be their proper interpreter. Marriage is one of them. We often hear it said that marriage is a mere legal compact. The state, it is true, has a vital interest in protecting the purity of the conjugal relation and may prescribe certain forms to which its citizens are bound to conform. But has the meaning of the new bond been indeed fully expressed, when the magistrate in the court room has pronounced the young man and the maiden to be now husband and wife? Among the ancient Hebrews youths and young girls were wont to meet on the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the year, the day of purification from sin, to cement their affections and plight their troth. For marriage itself was esteemed an act of purification. Marriage is the foundation of all morality. Its celebration does not end with the wedding day: it is a constant celebration, a perpetual intermarrying of two souls while life lasts. Not the state only, but humanity also, that ideal state of which we are all citizens, has an interest in the contract. A new sanctuary is to be reared sacred to the ineffable mysteries of the home-life; in the home with all the tender and holy associations that cluster about it let it be dedicated. The supreme festival of humanity is marriage. There shall be music and joy and a white-robed bride with myrtle wreath; and solemn words to express the solemn meanings of the act.