At this point let me warn you not to let a question of this importance
be settled by the celebrated matchmakers flourishing in almost every
community. Depend upon your own judgment divinely illumined. These
brokers in matrimony are ever planning how they can unite impecunious
innocence to an heiress, or celibate woman to millionaire or marquis,
and that in many cases makes life an unhappiness. How can any human
being, who knows neither of the two parties as God knows them, and who
is ignorant of the future, give such direction as you require at such
a crisis?
Take the advice of the earthly matchmaker instead of the divine
guidance, and you may some day be led to use the words of Solomon,
whose experience in home life was as melancholy as it was
multitudinous. One day his palace with its great wide rooms and great
wide doors and great wide hall was too small for him and the loud
tongue of a woman belaboring him about some of his neglects, and he
retreated to the housetop to get relief from the lingual bombardment.
And while there he saw a poor man on one corner of the roof with a
mattress for his only furniture, and the open sky his only covering.
And Solomon envies him and cries out: "It is better to dwell in the
corner of the housetop than with _a brawling woman_ in a wide house."
And one day during the rainy season the water leaked through the roof
of the palace and began to drop in a pail or pan set there to catch
it. And at one side of him all day long the water went drop! drop!
drop! while on the other side a female companion quarrelling about
this, and quarrelling about that, the acrimonious and petulant words
falling on his ear in ceaseless pelting--drop! drop! drop! and he
seized his pen and wrote: "A continual dropping in a very rainy day
and _a contentious woman_ are alike." If Solomon had been as prayerful
at the beginning of his life as he was at the close, how much domestic
infelicity he would have avoided!
But prayer about this will amount to nothing unless you pray soon
enough. Wait until you are fascinated and the equilibrium of your soul
is disturbed by a magnetic and exquisite presence, and then you will
answer your own prayers, and you will mistake your own infatuation for
the voice of God.