s, aspirations, capacities, powers, stand up side by side and
press against each other, either to please or fret and chafe each other.
Tastes, dispositions, feelings, either join in sweet, according
friendship, or rankle in disagreeable contact. Marriage is a union,
intimate, strong-bound, and vitally active. The union is a compound or a
mixture; it is natural, congenial, pleasing, or it is forced,
inharmonious, and revolting. Which it shall be we are to determine
before we enter it. We are not to shut our eyes to reason and common
sense, and marry whoever offers. Young women who do so may live to
repent it. If there is any period in a woman's whole life when her
sharpest eye, her keenest apprehension, her soundest judgment, and her
most religious seriousness are needed, it is when she proposes to
herself the question, "Shall I accept in marriage the hand that is
offered me?" It is the second greatest question of her life. It is the
question, the answer of which is to wring briny tears out of her heart
or baptize it in the waters of refreshing sympathy.

I once knew a merchant who used to say that "Goods well bought were half
sold." The idea is equally good when applied to the subject of Marriage.
A Marriage well entered is a life half lived. It is hard to make a
profit on badly bought goods. So it is hard to live a good and happy
life in Marriage bonds that bind and gall the heart that wears them. I
used to be a farmer, and I then learned that a balky horse would often
work well in an easy harness, while a good horse would be tricky and
stubborn in a collar that chafed. So I have often seen bad people who
lived very happily in the married life, so far as their personal
relations were concerned, while good people chafed and grieved in sad
matrimonial inharmony. Half the victory is in starting the battle right.
A man of more good sense than refinement once said, "Be sure you are
right, then go ahead." It is the utterance of wisdom, and is as
applicable to the subject before us as any other. "Be sure you are
right." We are not only to be right, but we are to know it. There is to
be no guess-work about it--no wish-work or hope-work about it. It is to
be knowledge-work. Applied to the subject in hand, young women are to
know that they are right in their Marriage alliances; are to know that
they have bargained with men after their own heart. They are not to
guess they are going to get pretty good husbands, nor hope they are,