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
Do not be caught in the delusion of many thousands in postponing a
home until they can have an expensive one. That idea is the devil's
trap that catches men and women innumerable who will never have any
home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people.
Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the
people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small
homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar.
In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman
to have a home. Morals and civilization and religion demand it.
SMALL HOMES NEEDED
We want done all over this land what George Peabody and Lady
Burdett-Coutts did in England, and some of the large manufacturers of
this country have done for the villages and cities, in building small
houses at cheap rents, so that the middle classes can have separate
homes. They are the only class not provided for. The rich have their
palaces, and the poor have their poorhouses, and criminals have their
jails; but what about the honest middle classes, who are able and
willing to work, and yet have small income? Let the capitalists,
inspired of God and pure patriotism, rise and build whole streets of
small residences. The laborer may have, at the close of the day, to
walk or ride further than is desirable to reach it, but when he gets
to his destination in the eventide he will find something worthy of
being called by that glorious and impassioned and heaven-descended
word, "home."
SOMETHING TO SAVE FOR.
Young married man, as soon as you can buy such a place, even if you
have to put on it a mortgage reaching from base to cap-stone. The
much abused mortgage, which is ruin to a reckless man, to one prudent
and provident is the beginning of a competency and a fortune, for the
reason he will not be satisfied until he has paid it off, and all the
household are put on stringent economies until then. Deny yourself all
superfluities and all luxuries until you can say: "Everything in this
house is mine, thank God!--every timber, every brick, every foot of
plumbing, every door-sill." Do not have your children born in a
boarding-house, and do not yourself be buried from one. Have a place
where your children can shout and sing and romp without being
overhauled for the racket. Have a kitchen where you can do something
toward the reformation of evil cookery and the lessening of this
nation of dyspeptics. As Napoleon lost one of his great battles by an
attack of indigestion, so many men have such
A DAILY WRESTLE
with the food swallowed that they have no strength left for the battle
of life; and though your wife may know how to play on all musical
instruments, and rival a prima donna, she is not well educated unless
she can boil an Irish potato and broil a mutton-chop, since the diet
sometimes decides the fate of families and nations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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