Page:Advice to young ladies on their duties and conduct in life - Arthur - 1849.djvu/187

Rh of such a man, would be, for any right-minded young woman, a sad misfortune; for happiness could not follow her union with him. And it is not to be concealed that her danger is very great. Money is so convenient and desirable a thing, and the attainment of it by marriage so much easier than earning it, that in a day when there is so little true appreciation of marriage as a divine and holy ordinance, instituted for the highest purposes by the Creator, as there is at present, the temptation for young men to seek for wealth in a union with some one who possesses it, is very great. The utterly unprincipled are not alone those whose regard for a young girl is greatly biased by the amount of her father’s fortune, or the income she may hold in her own right. So absorbing is the universal desire for money, and so much in the habit is almost every one of looking at it as the greatest good, and of seeking it rather as an end than as a means of usefulness, that even those who, in the ordinary matters of life, are governed by the best of motives, are apt to think money a virtue indispensable in a wife, and suffer themselves to be influenced in their choice by the grovelling and disgraceful consideration of dollars and cents.

As the end for which marriage is contracted will inevitably qualify the union, and bring