f my
text: "Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or
among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the
uncircumcised Philistines?"

MARRIAGE NOT FOR ALL.

That marriage is the destination of the human race is a mistake that I
want to correct before I go further. There are multitudes who never
will marry, and still greater multitudes who are not fit to marry. In
Great Britain to-day there are nine hundred and forty-eight thousand
more women than men, and that, I understand, is about the ratio in
America. By mathematical and inexorable law, you see, millions of
women will never marry. The supply for matrimony is greater than the
demand, the first lesson of which is that every woman ought to prepare
to take care of herself if need be. Then there are thousands of men
who have no right to marry, because they have become so corrupt of
character that their offer of marriage is an insult to any good woman.
Society will have to be toned up and corrected on this subject, so
that it shall realize that if a woman who has sacrificed her honor is
unfitted for marriage, so is any man who has ever sacrificed his
purity. What right have _you, O masculine beast_! whose life has been
loose, to take under your care the spotlessness of a virgin reared in
the sanctity of a respectable home? Will a buzzard dare to court a
dove?

THE FIRST STEP.

But the majority of you will marry, and have a right to marry, and as
your religious teacher I wish to say to these men, in the choice of a
wife first of all seek divine direction. About thirty-five years ago,
when Martin Farquhar Tupper, the English poet, urged men to prayer
before they decided upon matrimonial association, people laughed. And
some of them have lived to laugh on the other side of their mouth.

EMINENT BLUNDERERS.

The need of divine direction I argue from the fact that so many men,
and some of them strong and wise, have wrecked their lives at this
juncture. Witness Samson and this woman of Timnath! Witness
_Socrates_, pecked of the historical Xantippe! Witness _Job_, whose
wife had nothing to prescribe for his carbuncles but allopathic doses
of profanity! Witness _Ananias_, a liar, who might perhaps have been
cured by a truthful spouse, yet marrying as great a liar as
himself--Sapphira! Witness _John Wesley_, one of the best men that
ever lived, united to one of the most outrageous and scandalous of
women, who sat in City Road Chapel, mak