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bands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may, without the word, be won by the conversation of the wives, while they behold your chaste conversation, coupled with fear.

The Scriptures.

MUTUAL LOVE THE BASIS OF MARRIAGE.

MARRIAGE should in every case be formed

upon the basis of mutual attachment. If there be no love before marriage, it cannot be expected there should be any after it. Lovers, as all are supposed to be who are looking forward to this union, without love, have no right to expect happiness: the coldness of indifference · is soon likely, in their case, to be changed into aversion. There ought to be personal attachment. If there be any thing, even in the cxterior, that excites disgust, the banns are forbidden by the voice of nature.

Young people should be extremely careful to let no persuasions of others, no impulse of their own covetousness, no anxiety to be their own masters and mistresses, no ambition for secular splendor, induce them to enter into a connection

to which they are not drawn by the solicitations of a pure and virtuous love. What will a large house, splendid furniture, a gay equipage, and fashionable entertainments, do for their possessor, in the absence of connubial love?

Love must be mutual, or there can be no happiness; none for the party which does not love: for how dreadful the idea of being chained for life to an individual for whom we have no affection; to be almost ever in the company of a person from whom we are driven back by revulsion, yet driven back upon a bond which prevents all separation and escape! Nor can there be any happiness for the party that does love such an unrequited affection must soon expire, or live only to consume that wretched heart in which it burns.

:

John Angell James.

"THY PEOPLE, MY PEOPLE."

WHERE'ER thou goest, I will go;

Where'er thou diest, die;

Together in one humble grave
Our wedded dust shall lie.

And I will love thy chosen friends ;
Thy people shall be mine;
And we will kneel to praise one God
Before one common shrine.

TO A WIFE, WITH A RING.

EMBLEM of happiness, not bought nor sold,

Accept this modest ring of virgin gold. Love in this small but perfect circle trace, And duty in its soft but strict embrace: Plain, precious, pure, as best becomes the wife; Yet firm, to bear the frequent rubs of life. To guard at once and consecrate the shrine, Take this dear pledge: it makes and keeps thee

mine.

Dr. Drennan.

PURIFYING POWER OF LOVE.

IKE the ocean, love embraces the earth; and by love, as by the ocean, whatever is

sordid and unsound is borne away.

Landor.

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LOVE IN MARRIAGE.

OVE in marriage cannot live nor subsist unless it be mutual; and, where love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock nothing but the empty husk of an outside matrimony, as undelightful and unpleasing to God as any other kind of hypocrisy.

Milton.

WEDDED BLISS.

HAPPY, happier far than thou,

With the laurel on thy brow,

She that makes the humblest hearth
Lovely but to one on earth!

:

Mrs. Hemans.

NOTHING flatters a man so much as the hap piness of his wife he is always proud of himself as the source of it. The tear of a loving girl, says an old book, is like a dew-drop on the rose; but that on the cheek of a wife is a drop of poison to her husband.

Moser.

THE

THE TRUE FAMILY.

HE Christian family, which is the true family, is like a picture of one of the old masters, where time and neglect have hid the outline and obscured the colors. That black surface is a Poussin, a Raphael. A short time since, it was only a board, or a shred of canvas: now, thanks to the agency of a pious art, it will be a monument or a treasure. Let Christians read their duty in this short allegory. The fate of the State depends upon the condition of the family; the condition of the family depends upon them.

Vinet.

MOTHERS.

THE best of men have owed to their mothers, after God, those seeds of piety and spirituality that the paternal influence has so often dried up.

Vinet.

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