Some one may say, “But a woman does not choose her husband. She waits to be chosen, and can do no more than accept or refuse.” Yet the woman is to be pitied who marries a man whom her heart does not choose from among all men. If she is doubtful upon this point, she is not ready to marry.
There is something very sacred, almost awe inspiring, in the act by which a woman, at her entrance into the marriage state, confides all the interests of her life to the hands of him whom she accepts as her husband. She leaves father and mother and the home of her childhood; she severs all the ties that bind her to her old life; she gives up the friends and friendships of her youth; she cuts herself off from the sources of happiness to which all through her years she has been accustomed to turn; she looks up into the face of him who has asked her to be his wife, and with trembling heart, and yet with quiet confidence, entrusts to him and his keeping all the sacred interests of her life.
It is a holy trust which a man receives when a noble woman thus commits herself to his keeping. It is the life long happiness and well being of a gentle heart, capable of ineffable joy or of unmeasured misery. It is the whole earthly future of a life which may be fashioned into the beauty of Christ, or marred, its beauty forever shattered.
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