The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating MatrimonyTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating Matrimony
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Marriage
But do not become cynical on this subject. Society has a great
multitude of grand men who know how to make home happy. When they come
to be husbands they evince a nobility of nature and a self-sacrificing
spirit that surprise even the wife. These are the men who cheerfully
sit in dark and dirty business offices, ten feet by twelve, in summer
time hard at work while the wives and daughters are off at Saratoga,
Mount Desert, or the White Sulphur. These are the men who, never
having had much education themselves, have their sons at Yale, and
Harvard, and Virginia University. These are the men who work
themselves to death by fifty years of age, and go out to Greenwood
leaving large estate and generous life-insurance provision for their
families.
There are husbands and fathers here by the hundreds who would die for
their households. If outlawry should ever become dominant in our
cities they would stand in their doorway, and with their own arm would
cleave down, one by one, fifty invaders face to face, foot to foot,
and every stroke a demolition. This is what makes an army in defence
in a country fight more desperately than an army of conquest. It is
not so much the abstract sentiment of a flag as it is wife, and
children, and home that turns enthusiasm into a fury. The world has
such men by the million, and the homunculi that infest all our
communities must not hinder women from appreciating the glory of true
manhood.
FIDELITY IN ADVERSITY.
I was reading of a bridal reception. The young man had brought home
the choice of his heart in her elaborate and exquisite apparel. As she
stood in the gay drawing-room, and amid the gay group, the young man's
eyes filled with tears of joy as he thought that she was his. Years
passed by, and they stood at the same parlor on another festal
occasion. She wore the same dress, for business had not opened as
brightly to the young husband as he expected, and he had never been
able to purchase for her another dress. Her face was not as bright and
smooth as it had been years before, and a careworn look had made its
signature on her countenance. As the husband looked at her he saw the
difference between this occasion and the former, and he went over to
where she sat, and said: "You remember the time when we were here
before. You have the same dress on. Circumstances have somewhat
changed, but you look to me far more beautiful than you did then."
There is such a thing as conjugal fidelity, and many of you know it in
your own homes.
But, after all the good advice we may give you, we come back to the
golden pillar from which we started, the tremendous truth that no one
but God can guide you in safety about this matter that may decide your
happiness for two worlds, this and the next. So, my sister, I put your
case where Naomi put that of Ruth and Orpah when she said: "The Lord
grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her
husband."
THE WEDDING.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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