and replenish the earth,” the Almighty Creator has given us reason and endowed us with capacities of affection which are designed to guide us in these respects. A youth and maiden are thrown into each other’s society, an acquaintance, an intimacy, a mutual affection and reciprocal love follow. They feel themselves united, not merely harmonized, but morally consolidated, as it were, into a single being, and they mutually pledge each other to be thus as long as they both shall live. They are united, not by their pledges to each other, their mutual declarations of affection, but by those beautiful and mysterious affinities that God has planted in the soul itself, and the pledges and promises are the mere outward expression of their actual existence. It is thus sometimes said that marriages are made in Heaven, for there is an eternal fitness, a complete unity or oneness in these impalpable agencies which, whatever may be the seeming incongruities of character in some instances, thus link together for ever these human souls as well as persons. Alas! that it should so often be mistaken—that pride and vanity, or a groveling and sinful lust, should be imposed on the simple and loving heart of woman as the counterpart of her own glowing and beautiful affection; and the man guilty of this frightful sin, this “gallantry,” as the corrupt and rotten society of Europe designates the desecration of a woman’s soul, commits a crime infinitely more atrocious than murder or the mere destruction of the body of his victim. Unfortunately, too, accident, imperfect education, circumstances, a thousand things may and do lead both parties to mistake each other or themselves, and to rush into marriage only to discover a few months later, that they were deluded and deceived, and instead of that perfect unity of feeling, of affection, of soul, which they had believed in, there were contradictions and repugnances that no gentleness of temper or strength of reason or length of time could ever change, and therefore in sullen despair they settle down into hopeless apathy, or still worse, shock and scandalize society by a reckless violation of its laws as well as of the personal vows so sacredly pledged at the altar. But when the instincts of natural affection have been guided by reason and a true perception of the wants and nature of each other, and that perfect unity of feeling and of purpose exists which flows from this reciprocal adaptation of the parties, then there is marriage in its true sense, for then two relatively imperfect beings are united into one complete whole. And if we could suppose this husband and wife living for themselves alone, and isolated from all association with others, then nothing more would be needed. They were united by affection, by adaptation, by true perceptions of each other’s wants, by those mysterious affinities which we call love, in short, by an organic and eternal fitness, and their