Neither is wealth a true basis for the marriage choice.  “The love of money is the root of all evil;” and when it is the primary desideratum in marriage, it acts like a canker-worm upon domestic peace and happiness.  With too many in this day of money-making, marriage is but a pecuniary speculation, a mere gold and silver affair; and their match-making is but a money-making, that is, money makes the match.  Many parents (but we don’t call such Christians,) sacrifice their children upon the altar of mammon, and prostitute their earthly and eternal happiness to their love of filthy lucre.

Fatal mistake!  Will money make your children happy?  Is it for money you have them led to the bridal altar?  Ah! that sordid dust may cover the grave of their fondest hopes and connubial felicity.  Wed not your children to mere dollars and cents.  The hand that holds a purse and shakes it before you for your child, may hold also a dagger for both the child and the parent.  “Look not only for riches, lest thou be mated with misery.”  Wealth is good in its place, and we should not object to it, other things being equal.  But it never was nor can be good as an inducement to marry.  What a miserable policy it is, to make it the test of a proper match!  “Do not make the metals of earth the cord of the marriage tie.”  They are too brittle in their nature to do so.  They take to themselves wings and fly away.  The fine gold becomes dim; their cords are like ropes of glass-sand,—­

  “Like the spider’s most attenuated thread,
  They break at every breeze.”

Rank also is a false standard of judgment in the forming of a marriage alliance.  Many look only to position in society, make it everything, and think that acknowledged social distinction will compensate for the want of all other interests.  While there should be a social adaptation of character, and while you should—­

  “Be joined to thy equal in rank, or the foot of pride will kick at thee,”

yet there is nothing to justify marrying a person because of his or her social position.  The evils of this may be seen in the first classes of English society, where rank is mechanical, and where law forbids a trespass upon its bastard prerogatives; and as a consequence, relatives intermarry, until their descendants have degenerated into complete physical and mental imbecility.  Such nepotism as this is replete with untold disaster both in the family and in the state.  Too many in our democratic country ape this, look to rank, and are blind to all things else.  The fruits of this are seen in that codfish aristocracy which floats with self-inflated importance upon the troubled waters of society, causing too many of the little fish to float after them, until they land themselves in the deep and muddy waters of domestic ruin.

SECTION III.

TRUE TESTS IN THE SELECTION OF A COMPANION FOR LIFE.