But there are not only personal match-makers, in the form of tyrannical fathers, sentimental mothers, amorous grandmothers, and obsequious friends; but also book match-makers, in the form of love-sick tales and poetry, containing Eugene-Aram adventures, and scrapes of languishing girls with titled swains running off, calculated to heat the youthful imagination, distort the pictures of fancy, giving to marriage the air of a romantic adventure, and throwing over it a gaudy drapery, leading the young into a world of dreams and nonentities, where all is but a bubble of variegated colors and fantastic forms, which explodes before them as soon as it is touched by the finger of reality and experience.

These are the most dangerous match-makers.  Their sister companions in this evil are, the ball-room, the giddy dance and masquerade, the fashionable wine-cup and the costly apparel.  Let me affectionately exhort the members of the Christian home to keep all these at a distance.  Touch not, taste not, handle not!  They will poison the spirit and the affections, and encircle you with a viper’s coil from which there is no hope of escape.  Here parents have a right, and it is their duty, to interfere.  They can do so effectually by not allowing such filthy match-making intruders to pass the threshold of their homes.  What can you expect out an unhappy marriage, if you permit your sons and daughters to spend their time in converse with love-sick tales and languishing swains?  They will become love-sick, too, and long for marriage with one who is like the hero of their last-read romance.  Perhaps they will not think their matrimonial debut sufficiently flavored with romantic essence, unless they run off with some self-constituted count, or at least with their papa’s Irish groom!

3.  We might advert, finally, to some of those false influences which are frequently brought to bear upon the children’s choice of a companion for life.  The term smitten is here significant and deserves our serious consideration.  It carries in its pregnant meaning the evidence of a spurious feeling, and a false foundation of love and union.  Be it remembered that there must always be something to smite one.  We may be smitten by a scoundrel, or by something unworthy our affections.  Empty titles and mustaches often smite the susceptible young.  Sometimes the heart is smitten by a pretty face and form; and sometimes by a rod of gold.  The simple fact that we are smitten is not enough; we should know who or what it is that smites us.  When we are drawn to each other, it should be by a true cord, and by an influence which binds and cements for life.  The influence of mere outward beauty is a false one.  Those who are smitten by it, and drawn thus into a matrimonial union by an interest which is but skin-deep, and which may fade like the morning flower, are allured by a dazzling meteor, by a mere bubble, beautifully formed and colored, but empty within.  It may dazzle the eye, but it blinds us to all its blemishes