o other argument for delay has any claim to our notice.

On the other hand, the following, among other evils, are the results of
deferring marriage.

1. The temper and habits of the parties become stiff and unyielding
when advanced in life, and they learn to adapt themselves to each other
with difficulty. In the view which I have taken above they become
miserable as teachers, and still more miserable as scholars.

2. Youth are thus exposed to the danger of forming habits of criminal
indulgence, as fatal to the health and the character, as they are
ruinous to the soul.

3. Or if they proceed not so far, they at least acquire the habit of
spending time in vain or pernicious amusements. All mankind must and
will seek for gratifications of some sort or other. And aside from
religious principle, there is no certain security against those
amusements and indulgences which are pernicious and destructive, but
early and virtuous attachments, and the pleasures afforded by domestic
life. He can never want for amusement or rational gratification who is
surrounded by a rising family for whom he has a genuine affection.

4. Long continued celibacy _contracts_ the mind, if it does not
enfeeble it. For one openhearted liberal old bachelor, you will find
ten who are parsimonious, avaricious, cold-hearted, and too often
destitute of those sympathies for their fellow beings which the married
life has a tendency to elicit and perpetuate.[12]

5. Franklin says that late marriages are attended with another
inconvenience, viz.; that the chance of living to see our children
educated, is greatly diminished.

6. But I go much farther than I have hitherto done, and insist that
other things being equal, the young married man has the advantage in a
_pecuniary_ point of view. This is a natural result from the fact that
he is compelled to acquire habits of industry, frugality, and economy;
and is under less temptation to waste his time in trifling or
pernicious amusements. But I may appeal to facts, even here. Look
around you in the world, and see if out of a given number of single
persons, say one thousand, of the age of thirty-five, there be not a
greater number in poverty, than of the same number who settled in life
at twenty.

Perhaps I ought barely to notice another objection to these views. It
is said that neither the mind nor the body come to full maturity so
early as we are apt to suppose. But is complete maturity of body or
mind ind