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
Business men have in their fire-proof safes a file of papers
containing their contracts, and sometimes they take them out and read
them over to see what the party of the first part and the party of the
second part really bound themselves to do. Different ministers of
religion have their own peculiar forms of marriage ceremony; but if
you have forgotten what you promised at the altar of wedlock, you had
better buy or borrow an Episcopal Church-Service, which contains the
substance of all intelligent marriage ceremonies, when it says: "I
take thee to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day
forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge thee my
troth." Would it not be a good idea to have that printed in tract form
and widely distributed?
NEVER FLIRT.
The fact is, that many men are more kind to everybody else's wives
than to their own wives. They will let the wife carry a heavy coal
scuttle upstairs, and will at one bound clear the width of a parlor to
pick up some other lady's pocket-handkerchief. There is an evil which
I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men--namely,
husbands in flirtation. The attention they ought to put upon their own
wives they bestow upon others. They smile on them coyly and askance,
and with a manner that seems to say: "I wish I was free from that old
drudge at home. What an improvement you would be on my present
surroundings!" And bouquets are sent, and accidental meetings take
place, and late at night the man comes to his prosaic home, whistling
and hilarious, and wonders that the wife is jealous. There are
thousands of men who, while not positively immoral, need radical
correction of their habits in this direction. It is meanness
immeasurable for a man by his behavior to seem to say to his wife:
"You can't help yourself, and I will go where I please, and admire
whom I please, and I defy your criticism."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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