Page:Advice to young ladies on their duties and conduct in life - Arthur - 1849.djvu/183

Rh is wise and discriminating, and its devotion more real and lasting.

Marriage without such love is no marriage at all. It is merely an external union, from external grounds, and cannot be expected to, as it never does, yield any true happiness. Where no positively bad qualities exist in those who have contracted marriage from mere external considerations, it not unfrequently happens that the parties lead quiet and orderly lives, and seem to enjoy themselves very well, and imagine that they have all the pleasures attainable in the conjugal state. But they are more in error than they imagine.

In the chapter on the “,” something of the real difference between man and woman was shown; and we there called that difference a “uniting difference.” In the original creation of the sexes, God designed that a union should take place between them, and so organized them, spiritually, that such a union must take place, or both would be imperfect, and consequently unhappy; and the existence of the human race itself was made to depend upon this union. Marriage is, therefore, of divine ordination, and can never be entered into properly, except from the purest and the highest motives.

But enough has been said, we would fain