The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1886-02-18


| viii fill your life, there is great danger
that he viii despoil your hope of Heaven,
and make your marriage relation an inf
mite and eternal disaster. If you have
made such an engagement, your first duty
is to break it. My word may come just in
time to save your soul.
Further, do not unite in marriage with a
man of bad habits, in the idea OF reform
ing him. If now, under the restraint of
your present acquaintance, he viii not
give up his bad habits, after he has won
the prize you can not expect him to do so.
You might as well plant violet in the
face OF northeast storm, with the idea of
appeasing it. You might as well run a
schooner alongside of burning ship, with
the idea of saving the ship The conse-
quence will be, schooner and ship will be
destroyed together. The alms-ho could
tell the story of q hundred women who
married men to reform them. If by
twenty years of age man has been
grappled by intoxicants, he is under such
Roadway that your attempt to stop him
would be very much like run
ming up the track with wheelbarrow
to stop a Hudson River express train.
What you call an inebriate nowadays is
not victim to wine or whisky, but to log
wood and strychnine and nux vomica All
these poisons have kindled their fires in his
tongue and brain, and all the tears of a
wife weeping can no. extinguish the flames.
Instead OF marrying man to reform him
let him reform first and then give him time
to see whether the reform is to be perma-
nent. Let him understand that il he can
not do without his bad habits for two
years he must do without you forever.
Avoid union with one supremely selfish
or so wound up in his occupation that he
has no room for another. You occasionally
find man who spreads himself so widely
over the path of life that there is no room
for any one to walk beside him. He is not
the one blade of a scissors incomplete with
out the other blade, but he is clisel made
to cut his way through life alone, or a file
full of roughness, made to be drawn across
society without any affinity for other files.
His disposition is lifelong protest against
marriage: Others are so married to their
occupation Or profession that the taking of
any other bride is a case of bigamy. There
al . itiCH 50 SoF UiCu w tuSli
work, as was Chatterton, whose essay was
not printed because of the death of the
Lord Mayor. Chatterton made out the fol-
lowing account: "Lost by the Lord Mayors
death in this essay, 81 lis Cd. Gained in
elegies and essays, e. 5s." Then he
put what he had gained by the
Lord Mayors death opposite to what
he had lost, and wrote under it:
Sand glad he is dead by f3 1Ss 3d."
When a man is as hopelessly literary as
that, he ought to be perpetual celibate;
his library, his laboratory, his books are
all the companionship needed. Indeed,
some of the mightiest men this world ever
saw have not patroniZed matrimony.
Cowper, Pope, Newton, Swift, Locke,
Walpole, Gibbon, Hume, Arbuthnot were
single. Some of these marriage would
have helped. The right kind of wife
would have cured Cowper's gloom, and
given to Newton more practicability, and
been relief to Locke's overtaxed brain.
Christian wife might have converted
Hume and Gibbon to belief in Christian
ity. But Dean Swift did not deserve
wife, from the way in which he broke the
heart of Jane Waring first, and Esther
johnson afterward, and last Of all IVAN
essa." The great wit Of his day, he was
outwitted by his own craelties.
Amid so many possibilities of fatal mis-
take. ain not right in urging you to seek
the unerring wisdom of God, and before
you are infatuated? Because most mar
riages are fit to be made convinces us that
they are diyinely arranged. Almost
every cradle has an affinity toward some
other cradle. They may be on the opposite
sides Of the earth, but one child gets out
of this cradle and another child gets out
of that cradle, and with their first steps
they start for each other. They may diverge
from the straight path going toward the
north, or south, or east, or west. They may
fall down, but the two rise facing each
other. They are approaching all
through infancy. The one all
through the years of boyhood is going to
meet the one who is coming through all
the years Of girlhood to meet him. The
decision of parents as to what is best con-
corning them and the changes of fortune
may for a time seem to arrest the two
Journeys, but on they go. They may never
have seen each other. They may never
have heard of each other. But the two pill
grims who started at the two cradles, are
nearing. After eighteen, twenty OF thirty
years, the two come come within sight.
AT the first glance they may feel dislike,
and they may slacken their step; yet
something that the world calls fate. and
that religion calls providence, urges them
on. They must meet. They come near
enough to join hands in social acquaint-
ance, after awhile to join hands in friend
ship, after awhile to join hearts. The
delegate from the one cradle comes up the
east side of the church with her father.
The delegate from the other cradle comes
up the west aisle of the church. The two
long journeys end at the snowdrift of the
bridal veil. The two chains made out of
many years are forged together by the
golden link which the groom puts upon the
third finger of the left hand. One on
earth, may they be one in heaven!
But there are so many exceptions to the
general rule of natural affinity, that only
those are safe who pray for a heavenly
hand to lead them. Because they depend
ed on themselves aud not on God there are
thousands of women every year going to
slaughter. In India women leap on the
funeral pyre of dead husband. We have