The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1886-02-25

that the dead are there.
In view of all this charge you to break
up clandestine correspondence il you are
engaged in it, and have no more clandes-
tine meetings either at the ferry, or on the
street, or at the house of mutual friends, or
at the corner of the woods. Do not have
letters come for you to the post-office under
assumed address. Have no correspondence
that makes you uneasy lest some one by
mistake open your letters. Do not employ
terms of endearment at the beginning and
close of letters, unless you have a right to
use them. That young lady is on the edge
of danger who dares not allow her mother
to see her letters.
If you have sensible parents take them
into your confidence in all the affairs of
the heart. They will give you more good
advice in one hour than you can get from
all the world beside in five years. They
have toiled for you so long and prayed for
you so much, they have your best interests
at heart. At the same time let parents re-
view their opposition to proposed mari
tai alliance, and see if their opposition is
founded on genuine wish for the child's
welfare, or on some within or notion Or
prejudice or selfishness, fighting natural
law and trying to make Niagara run up
stream. Mr. Pitt, the Prime Minister of
England, was always saying wise things.
One day Sir Walter Farquar called on him
In great perturbation. Mr.. Pitt inquired
what was the matter, and Sir Walter told
him that his daughter was about
to be married to one not worthy of her
rank. Mr.. Pitt said: s'Is the
young man of respectable family?" Eyes"
SIS he respectable in himself?" eyes"
"Has he an estimable character?" eyes"
"Why, then, my dear Sir Walter, make no
opposition" The advice was taken, and
happy married life ensued. Let ministers
and officers of the law decline officiating
at clandestine marriages. When they are
asked to date marriage certificate back,
as we all are asked, let them peremptorily
decline to say that the ceremony was in
November instead of January, or decline
to leave the date blank lest others fill out
the record enormously. Let a law be
passed in all our States, as it has already
been in some of our States, making
license from officers of the law necessary
before we can unite couples, and then make
it necessary to publish beforehand in the
newspapers, as it used to be published in
the New England churches, so that il
there be lawful objection it may be pre-
sented, not swinging the buoy on the
rocks after the ship has struck and gone to
pieces. And here it might be well for me
to take all the romance out of an escapade
by quoting a. dozen lines of Robert Pollock,
the great Scotch poet, where he describes
the crazed victim of one of these esca-
pades:
Yet had she many days
OF sorrow in the world, but never wept,
She lived on aims, and carried In her hand
Some withered stalks she gathered in the
spring.
When any asked the cause. she smiled and
said
They were her sisters and would como and
watch
Her grave when she was dead. She never
spoke
OF her deceiver father, mother, home
Or child, or heaven, or hell, or God, but still
In lonely places walked, and ever gazed
Upon the withered stalks and talked them;
Till wasted to the shadow of her youth
with woe too wide to see beyond, she died.
But now turn on this subject an intenser
light. We have fifteen hundred lights in
this church. and when by electric touch
they are kindled in the evening service it
is almost startling. But this whole subject
OF "Clandestine Marriages and Escapadesn
put under more intense light than that.
| The headlight of locomotive is terrible if
you stand near enough to catch the full
| glare of it. As it sweeps around the
Horseshoe curve' of the Alleghenies or
along the edge OF the Sierra Nevadas, how
| far ahead, and how deep down, and how
high up it flashes, aud there is instantane-
GUS revelation of mountain peak and wild
bea Is hieing themselves to their caverns,
and cascades thousand feet tall, clinging
in white terror to the precpices. But
more intense, more far reaching, more
sudden, swifter and more tremendous,
is the headlight of an advancing Jud gment
Day, under which all the most hidden af-
| fairs of life shall come to discovery and ar
raignment. / quote an overwhelming
| passage of Scripture, in which l put the
whole emphasis on the word 'secret:"
God shall bring every work into judgment
with every secret thing, whether it be good
| or evil.
What time that will be in which the
| cover shall be lifted from every heme and
from every heart. The iniquity may have
been so sly that it escaped all human de-
lection, but it will be as well known on
| that day as the crimes Of Sodom and Co.
morrah, unless, for Christ's sake, it has
been forgiven. All the fingers of universal
condemnation viii be pointed at it. The
archangel of wrath will stand there with
uplifted thunderbolt ready to strike it.
The squeami hness aud prudery of earth
ly society, which hardly allowed
| some sins to be mentioned on earth, are
past, and the man who was unclean and
| the woman who was impure will, under a
| light brighter than a thousand MONDAY
] sun, stand with the whole story written on
scalp and forehead and cheeks and hands
and feet; the whole resurrection body
afiame and dripping with fiery disclosures,
ten thousand sepulchral and celestial and
Internal voices crying: "Uncleani I'm
clean! Unclean"
| All marital intrigues and all secret in
EQUITIES will be published as though all
the trumpets spoke them and all the light
nings capitalized them and all the earth
| quakes rumbled them. man, recreant to