ing mouths at him while he
preached! Witness the once connubial wretchedness of _John Ruskin_,
the great art essayist, and _Frederick W. Robertson_, the great
preacher! Witness a thousand

HELLS ON EARTH

kindled by unworthy wives, termagants that scold like a March
north-easter; female spendthrifts, that put their husbands into
fraudulent schemes to get money enough to meet the lavishment of
domestic expenditure; _opium-using women_--about four hundred thousand
of them in the United States--who will have the drug, though it should
cause the eternal damnation of the whole household; heartless and
overbearing, and namby-pamby and unreasonable women, yet
married--married perhaps to good men! These are the women who build
the low club-houses, where the husbands and sons go because they can't
stand it at home. On this sea of matrimony, where so many have been
wrecked, am I not right in advising divine pilotage?

NUMEROUS PITFALLS.

Especially is devout supplication needed, because of the fact that
society is so full of artificialities that men are deceived as to whom
they are marrying, and no one but the Lord knows. After the
dressmaker, and the milliner, and the jeweler, and the hair-adjuster,
and the dancing-master, and the cosmetic art have completed their
work, how is an unsophisticated man to decipher the physiological
hieroglyphics, and make accurate judgment of who it is to whom he
offers hand and heart? This is what makes so many recreant husbands.
They make an honorable marriage contract, but the goods delivered are
so different from the sample by which they bargained. They were simply
swindled, and they backed out. They mistook Jezebel for Longfellow's
Evangeline, and Lucretia Borgia for Martha Washington.

Aye, as the Indian, chief boasts, of the scalps he has taken, so
there are in society to-day many coquettes who boast of the masculine
hearts they have captured. And these women, though they may live amid
richest upholstery, are not so honorable as the cyprians of the
street, for these advertise their infamy, while the former profess
heaven while they mean hell.

There is so much counterfeit womanhood abroad it is no wonder that
some cannot tell the genuine coin from the base. Do you not realize
you need divine guidance when I remind you that mistake is possible in
this important affair, and, if made, is irrevocable?

A MISTAKE IRREPARABLE.

The worst predicament possible is to be unhappily yok