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
If it be possible, O father and mother! let your sons and daughters go
out into the world under the semi-omnipotent memory of a good, pure
home. About your two or three rooms in a boarding-house or a family
hotel you can cast no such glorious sanctity. They will think of these
public caravanseries as an early stopping place, malodorous with old
victuals, coffees perpetually steaming, and meats in everlasting stew
or broil, the air surcharged with carbonic acid, and corridors along
which drunken boarders come staggering at one o'clock in the morning,
rapping at the door till the affrighted wife lets them in. Do not be
guilty of the sacrilege or blasphemy of calling such a place a home.
WHAT A HOME IS.
A home is four walls enclosing one family with identity of interest,
and a privacy from outside inspection so complete that it is a world
in itself, no one entering except by permission--bolted and barred and
chained against all outside inquisitiveness. The phrase so often used
in law books and legal circles is mightily suggestive--every man's
house is his castle. As much so as though it had drawbridge,
portcullis, redoubt, bastion and armed turret. Even the officer of the
law may not enter to serve a writ, except the door be voluntarily
opened unto him; burglary, or the invasion of it, a crime so offensive
that the law clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it. Unless
it be necessary to stay for longer or shorter time in family hotel or
boarding-house--and there are thousands of instances in which it is
necessary, as I showed you at the beginning--unless in this
exceptional case, let neither wife nor husband consent to such
permanent residence.
HAZARDOUS TO MORALS.
The probability is that the wife will have to divide her husband's
time with public smoking or reading room, or with some coquettish
spider in search of unwary flies; and if you do not entirely lose your
husband it will be because he is divinely protected from the disasters
that have whelmed thousands of husbands with as good intentions as
yours. Neither should the husband, without imperative reason, consent
to such a life unless he is sure his wife can withstand the temptation
of social dissipation which sweeps across such places with the force
of the Atlantic Ocean when driven by a September equinox. Many wives
give up their homes for these public residences so that they may give
their entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees,
and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and
round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots
off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and
in the other a soul.
THE LARES AND PENATES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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