s the lifelong welfare of a person to the
acquisition of material things. It introduces fraud and injustice into
the inmost center of one's life, and makes respect of self, happiness in
marriage, faith in human nature forever impossible. The deliberate
formation of a loveless marriage is a blasphemy against God, a crime
against society, a wrong to a fellow being, and a bitter and lasting
curse to one's own soul.

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

+Self-sufficiency fatal to the family.+--The shortcoming which most
frequently keeps individuals outside of the family, and keeps them
incomplete and imperfect members of the family after they enter it, is
the self-sufficiency which is induced by a life of protracted
independence. Marriage is from one point of view a sacrifice, a
giving-up. The bachelor can spend more money on himself than can the
married man who must provide for wife and children. The single woman can
give to study and music and travel an amount of time and attention which
is impossible to the wife and mother. Such a view of marriage is
supremely mean and selfish. Only a very little and sordid soul could
entertain it. There are often the best and noblest of reasons why man or
woman should remain single. It is a duty to do so rather than to marry
from any motive save purest love. Marriage, however, should be regarded
as the ideal state for every man and woman. To refuse to marry for
merely selfish reasons; or to carry over into marriage the selfish
individualistic temper, which clings so tenaciously to the little
individual self that it can never attain the larger self which comes
from real union and devotion to another--this is to sin against human
nature, and to prove one's self unworthy of membership in society's most
fundamental and sacred institution.

The child who sets his own will against his parent's, the mother who
thrusts her child out of her presence in order to pursue pleasures more
congenial than the nurture of her own offspring, the man who leaves his
family night after night to spend his evenings in the club or the
saloon, the woman who spends on dress and society the money that is
needed to relieve her husband from overwork and anxiety, and to bring up
her children in health and intelligence, do an irreparable wrong to the
family, and deal a death blow to the home.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

+Self-obliteration robs the family of the best we have to give it.+--The
man who makes himself a slave; goes bey