generations of suffering men and women have worked out for you, and you will be broken as the bud is broken into the blossom, as the acorn is broken into the oak—­broken into a higher and stronger life.  On the other hand rebel against it, attempt to drag it down or cast it from its place, and it will crush you, and grind some part of your higher nature to powder.  How strangely and sadly is this shown in the case of one of our greatest writers, who thought that the influence of her writings would far outweigh the influence of her example, but whose name and example are now constantly used by bad men to overcome the virtue of young educated girls struggling alone in London, and often half starving on the miserable pittance which is all they can earn.  But still more is it shown in the life of the nation which tampers with the laws of marriage and admits freedom of divorce.  Either such suits must be heard in camera without the shame of exposure, when divorce is so facilitated that the family and the State rest rather on a superstructure of rickety boards than on a rock; or they must be heard in public court and form a moral sewer laid on to the whole nation, poisoning the deepest springs of its life, and through that polluted life producing far more individual misery than it endeavors to remedy in dissolving an unhappy marriage.  God only knows what I suffered when a cause celebre came on, and I felt that the whole nation was being provided with something worse and more vitally mischievous than the most corrupt French novel.

Deeply do I regret—­and in this I think most thoughtful minds will agree with me—­that the Reformers in their inevitable rebound from the superstitions of Rome, rejected her teaching of the sacramental nature of marriage, which has made so many Protestant nations tend to that freedom of divorce which is carried to so great an extent in some parts of America, and is spreading, alas! to many of our own colonies—­a laxity fatally undermining the sanctity and stability of the family.  If marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?

I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching of modern fiction—­even of so great a novelist as George Meredith—­which inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the higher law of love, or rather, passion.  In teaching your sons, and especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but on duty.  To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind.  There is but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations