The worst predicament possible is to be unhappily yoked together. You
see, it is impossible to break the yoke. The more you pull apart, the
more galling the yoke. The minister might bring you up again, and in
your presence read the marriage ceremony backward, might put you on
the opposite sides of the altar from where you were when you were
united, might take the ring off of the finger, might rend the
wedding-veil asunder, might tear out the marriage leaf from the family
Bible record, but all that would fail to unmarry you. It is better not
to make the mistake than to attempt its correction. But men and women
do not reveal all their characteristics till after marriage, and how
are you to avoid committing the fatal blunder? There is only one Being
in the universe who can tell you whom to choose, and that is the Lord
of Paradise. He made Eve for Adam, and Adam for Eve, and both for each
other. Adam had not a large group of women from whom to select his
wife, but it is fortunate, judging from some mistakes which she
afterward made, that it was Eve or nothing.
There is in all the world some one who was made for you, as certainly
as Eve was made for Adam. All sorts of mistakes occur because Eve was
made out of a rib from Adam's side. Nobody knows which of his
twenty-four ribs was taken for the nucleus. If you depend entirely
upon yourself in the selection of a wife, there are twenty-three
possibilities to one that you will select the wrong rib. By the fate
of Ahab, whose wife induced him to steal; by the fate of Macbeth,
whose wife pushed him into massacre; by the fate of James Ferguson,
the philosopher, whose wife entered the room while he was lecturing
and willfully upset his astronomical apparatus, so that he turned to
the audience and said: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have the misfortune to
be married to this woman;" by the fate of Bulwer, the novelist, whose
wife's temper was so incompatible that he furnished her a beautiful
house near London and withdrew from her company, leaving her with the
dozen dogs whom she entertained as pets; by the fate of John Milton,
who married a termagant after he was blind, and when some one called
her a rose, the poet said: "I am no judge of flowers, but it may be
so, for I feel the thorns daily;" by the fate of an Englishman whose
wife was so determined to dance on his grave that he was buried in the
sea; by the fate of a village minister whom I knew, whose wife threw a
cup of hot tea across the table because they differed in sentiment--by
all these scenes of disquietude and domestic calamity, we implore you
to be cautious and prayerful before you enter upon the connubial
state, which decides whether a man shall have two heavens or two
hells, a heaven here and heaven forever, or a hell now and a hell
hereafter.