the greater brilliance and glory of their soul. Likewise
excuseless is any man in our time who makes lifelong alliance with any
one who, because of her disposition, or heredity, or habits, or
intellectual vanity, or _moral twistification_, may be said to be of
the Philistines.

MODERN FEMALE LOVELINESS.

The world never owned such opulence of womanly character or such
splendor of womanly manners or multitudinous instances of wifely,
motherly, daughterly, sisterly devotion, as it owns to-day. I have
not words to express my admiration for good womanhood. Woman is not
only man's equal, but in affectional and religious nature, which is
the best part of us, she is seventy-five per cent his superior. Yea,
during the last twenty years, through the increased opportunity opened
for female education, the women of the country are better educated
than the majority of men; and if they continue to advance in mentality
at the present ratio, before long the majority of men will have
difficulty in finding in the opposite sex enough ignorance to make
appropriate consort. If I am under a delusion as to the abundance of
good womanhood abroad, consequent upon my surroundings since the hour
I entered this life until now, I hope the delusion will last until I
embark from this planet. So you will understand, if I say in this
course of sermons something that seems severe, I am neither cynical
nor disgruntled.

NO NEED TO MARRY A FOOL.

There are in almost every farmhouse in the country, in almost every
home of the great town, conscientious women, worshipful women,
self-sacrificing women, holy women, innumerable Marys, sitting at the
feet of Christ; innumerable mothers, helping to feed Christ in the
person of His suffering disciples; a thousand capped and spectacled
grandmothers Lois, bending over Bibles whose precepts they have
followed from early girlhood; and tens of thousands of young women
that are dawning upon us from school and seminary, that are going to
bless the world with good and happy homes, that shall eclipse all
their predecessors, a fact that will be acknowledged by all men except
those who are struck through with moral decay from toe to cranium; and
more inexcusable than the Samson of the text is that man who, amid all
this unparalleled munificence of womanhood, marries a fool. But some
of you are abroad suffering from such disaster, and to halt others of
you from going over the same precipice, I cry out in the words o