Having read much about love in a cottage people brought up in ease will go and starve in a hovel. Runaway matches and elopements, 999 out of 1000 of which mean death and hell, multiplying on all hands. You see them in every day's newspapers. Our ministers in this region have no defence such as they have in other cities where the banns must be previously published and an officer of the law must give a certificate that all is right; so clergymen are left defenceless, and unite those who ought never to be united. Perhaps they are too young or perhaps they are standing already in some domestic compact.

By the wreck of ten thousand homes, by the holocaust of ten thousand sacrificed men and women, by the hearthstone of the family which is the corner-stone of the State, and in the name of that God who hath set up the family institution and who hath made the breaking of the marital oath the most appalling of all perjuries, I implore the Congress of the United States to make some righteous, uniform law for all the States and from ocean to ocean, on this subject of marriage and divorce.

ADVICE TO LOVERS.

Let me say to the hundreds of young people in this house this morning, before you give your heart and hand in holy alliance, use all caution; inquire outside as to habits, explore the disposition, scrutinize the taste, question the ancestry, and find out the ambitions. Do not take the heroes and the heroines of cheap novels for a model. Do not put your lifetime happiness in the keeping of a man who has a reputation for being a little loose in morals or in the keeping of a woman who dresses fast. Remember that while good looks are a kindly gift of God wrinkles or accident may despoil them. Remember that Byron was no more celebrated for his beauty than for his depravity. Remember that Absalom's hair was not more splendid than his habits were despicable. Hear it, hear it! The only foundation for happy marriage that ever has been or ever will be, is good character.

ASK FATHER AND MOTHER'S COUNSEL

in this most important step of your life. They are good advisers. They are the best friends you ever had. They made more sacrifices for you than any one else ever did, and they will do more to-day for your happiness than any other people. Ask them, and, above all,

ASK GOD.

I used to smile at John Brown of Haddington because when he was about to offer his hand and heart in marriage to one who became his lifelong companion, he opened the conversation by saying, "Let us pray." But I have seen so many shipwrecks on the sea of matrimony, I have made up my mind that John Brown of Haddington was right. A union formed in prayer will be a happy union, though sickness pale the cheek, and poverty empty the bread tray, and death open the small graves, and all the path of life be strewn with thorns, from the marriage altar with its wedding march and orange blossoms clear on down to the last farewell at that gate where Isaac and Rebecca, Abraham and Sarah, Adam and Eve, parted.

And let me say to you who are in this relation, if you make one man or woman happy you have not lived in vain. Christ says that what He is to the Church you ought to be to each other; and if sometimes through difference of opinion or difference of disposition you make up your mind that your marriage was a mistake, patiently bear and forbear, remembering that life at the longest is short and that for those who have been badly mated in this world, death will give quick and immediate bill of divorcement written in letters of green grass on quiet graves. And perhaps, my brother, my sister, perhaps you may appreciate each other better in heaven than you have appreciated each other on earth.

In the "Farm Ballads" our American poet puts into the lips of a repentant husband after a life of married perturbation these suggestive words: