The effect of association with divorced people--and there is no grade of society which does not contain them--is especially deplorable upon young people of marriageable age. The veriest heathen who has studied the influences of marriage will admit that the rising generation needs greater seriousness in contemplating wedlock. But what can be expected of any good-natured, well-meaning, thoughtless, careless, pleasure-loving, selfish young man or girl--and nearly all young people are fairly described by these adjectives--who, while wondering whether or no to propose to, or accept, some attractive person of the opposite sex, is continually reminded by certain facts and incidents that if the bond becomes irksome it may be broken at will? Some husbands and wives fight like cats and dogs, but in spite of it all, thank God, they still dearly love their children. What man or woman within the pale of decency would give a daughter in marriage with the thought that she might be put away by her husband at some time for some cause recognized by the courts of Utah, or Chicago, or Indiana, as sufficient for divorce? What parent will allow a son to mate with a girl who might possibly weary of him, release herself through legal measures and become the wife of some other man? Physicians and spiritual directors agree that persistent thought upon the lower developments and interests of the marriage relation are extremely injurious to human character. What other phases of married life can be much dwelt upon by the mind of any one who thinks at all of the possibility of divorce for any cause but the most serious? The relationship thus regarded is so nearly that of the animals that love, so far as it has existed, must be brought down to the level of passion, and passion afterward to that of lust, and lust in turn down to appetite, until beings, who once had hopes and aspirations and longings which, in spite of being unfortified by knowledge and principle, were noble in themselves, place themselves practically on the level of the beasts. According to managers and chaplains of great prisons there is hope of reform for almost any criminal whose offences were committed only through what are called the selfish instincts, by which is generally meant destructiveness and theft. But these same experts in crime are utterly hopeless of the reformation of any one whose sexual instincts have become depraved or even inverted. Yet it is difficult for any one to go through a divorce case, or to think steadily upon the possibility of divorce, without such a deterioration of sexual feeling, impulse, and aspiration. What hope can there be that such persons will occupy a respectable position in society in the future?