MARRIAGE.
For all professions, trades and callings in life, men and women prepare themselves by previous attention to their principles and duties. They study them, devote time and money to them. Every imaginable case, difficulty or trial is considered and duly disposed of according to the general principles of the trade or profession. But marriage, the most important and holy relation of life, involving the most sacred responsibilities and influences, social, civil and religious, that bear upon men and women, is entered upon in hot haste or blind stupidity by a great majority of the men and women of to-day.
No man has a right to ask a woman to enter matrimonial bonds with him unless he is thoroughly acquainted with the female constitution and character, for he who knows not her nature knows not how to gratify or satisfy that nature. It is ignorance in these matters that causes a great amount of matrimonial infelicity. Marriage, to be a blessing, must be properly entered. It has its fundamental laws, which must be obeyed.
The conditions upon which its joys and advantages are realized may be learned beforehand, and should not be entered in blindness, but in the light of a perfect knowledge of its rules and regulations, its promises, conditions, laws and privileges, so that no uncertainty shall follow a knowledge of its reality. Some are disappointed in marriage because they expect too much from it. Their imagination has pictured a condition of things never experienced on this side of heaven. With the marriage ceremony you enter a new world, if you enter understandingly, and live as becomes thoughtful, considerate human beings, each trying to bear with the other’s infirmities, and to consider the other’s happiness as paramount to their own. Marriage then becomes a delightful scene of domestic happiness, to which all true men and women look forward as the condition of life most consonant to their true happiness.