Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1869-06-24
EARLY MARRIAGES.
BY HENRY WARD BEECHER.

At no later period, perhaps, in their life do
young men need the Inspirations of virtuous love
and the sympathy Of companion in their self:
denying toll as when they first enter the battle for
their own support. Early marriages are perma-
nent moralities, and deferred marriages are temp
tations to wickedness. And yet every year it be.
comes more and more difficult, concurrent with the
reigning ideas of society, for young men to enter
upon that matrimonial state which is the proper
guard of their vrtue well as the source of their
courage and enterprise. The battle Of Life is al
ways at the beginning. There it is where man
needs wedlock. But q wicked and ridiculous pub
lie sentiment puts man who is in society, or out
of it, for that NATTER largely on the ground ofcon
dition, and not of disposition and character. The
man that has means wherewith he can visbly live
amply, is in good society, as general rule. The
man that has virtue and stern manliness, but has
nothing witha external to show isnot usually con-
sidered in good society. Ambitious young men
will not therefore marry until they can meet their
expenses; but that is defeing for years and years
the indispensable virtue. Society is bad where
two cannot live cheaper than one! and young men
morning of life, and better fitted than at any later
period to grow together with one who is their
equal and mate, are debarred from marrying,
through scores of years, from mere prudential con-
siderations; and the heart and the life are sacri-
feed to the pocket. They are tempted to substi-
tute ambition for love, when at last over the ashes
and expiring embers of their carly romance they
select their wife. 1t is said that the men who wait
until they are forty or fortyfve years ofage select
wisely. Alas for the wife who was not first q
sweetheart Prudence is good, but what is pru-
dence? It is the dry calculation Of the head
leagued with the pocket. Is there no prudence in
taste, nor prudence in the inspirations of gener
GUS love? Is there no prudence in the faith by
which banded, two young persons so down into
the struggle Of life, saying ''come veal, come woe
come storm, come calm, love is a match for cir
cumstances and We will be all to each other!"
Woe be to that society in which the customs and
manners of the times put of, beyond the period Of
romance and af6ancing, the wedding You have
adjourned the most important secular act Of a
mans life. You have adjourned it out of Eden
into the wilderness. The girl, next infected land
even women fal) with the public spirit, too often
waits to be wooed by those who can place her
again in the very beginning of her welded life,
where she was when broken off as branch from
the parental tree. But graft should always be
willing to be graft, and wait till it can make its
own top by legitimate growing. And woe is the
day when every girl says, II will not marry until
my husband in tho beginning has as much as my
father had at the end of his life''-For she-what
is she? Who was it that Jupiter won in shower
of gold? Whoever it was, that is the type She
whose heart is won by abundance; she who is
bought into matrimony by house and land; she
who marries for genteel wealth-she it is that Ju-
piter seduced by gold. For all wedlock is adulter-
GUS in which it is not the heart that inspires mar
riage.
Noble is that young spirit, which, seeing and
loving, and choosing, and silently biding her choice,
is won and chosen, and giving herself freely, rom
anticaly, if you will, (God be thanked for the
romance goes down to the level Of her husbands
nothingness and poverty, that she and he may,