During our Civil War a marriage was about to be celebrated at
Charleston, S.C., between Lieutenant de Rochelle and Miss Anna, the
daughter of ex-Governor Pickens. As the ceremony was about to be
solemnized a shell broke through the roof and wounded nine of the
guests, and the bride fell dying, and, wrapped in her white wedding
robe, her betrothed kneeling at her side, in two hours she expired.
And there has been many as bright a union of hearts as that proposed
that the bombshell of outrageous parental indignation has wounded and
scattered and slain.
If the hand offered in marriage be blotched of intemperance; if the
life of the marital candidate has been debauched; if he has no visible
means of support, and poverty and abandonment seem only a little way
ahead; if the twain seem entirely unmatched in disposition, protest
and forbid, and re-enforce your opinion by that of others, and put all
lawful obstacles in the way; but do not join that company of parents
who have ruined their children by a plutocracy of domestic crankiness
which has caused more than one elopement. I know of a few cases where
marriage has been under the red-hot anathema of parents and all the
neighbors, but God approved, and the homes established have been
beautiful and positively Edenic.
But while we have admitted there are real cases of justifiable
rebellion, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred--yea, in nine hundred
and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, these unlicensed departures
and decampments by moonlight are ruin, temporal and eternal. It is
safer for a woman to jump off the docks of the East River and depend
on being able to swim to the other shore, or get picked up by a
ferry-boat. The possibilities are that she may be rescued, but the
probability is that she will not. Read the story of the escapades in
the newspapers for the last ten years, and find me a half dozen that
do not mean poverty, disgrace, abandonment, police court, divorce,
death, and hell. "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret
is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there." Satan
presides over the escapade. He introduces the two parties to each
other. He gets them to pledge their troth. He appoints where they
shall meet. He shows them where they can find officiating minister or
squire. He points out to them the ticket office for the rail train. He
puts them aboard, and when they are going at forty miles the hour he
jumps off and leaves them in the lurch; for, while Satan has a genius
in getting people into trouble, he has no genius for getting people
out. He induced Jonah to take ship for Tarshish when God told him to
go to Nineveh, but provided for the recreant prophet no better
landing-place than the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.