To cherish the ideal of a man with whom to walk on her way
through the world, is as right for a woman as it was for God to make
them male and female; and to the wise virgin it will ever be a solemn
thought, lovelily dwelt upon, and never mockingly, when most playfully
handled. For there is a play even with most serious things that has in
it no offense. Humor has its share even in religion--but oh, how few
seem to understand its laws! I confess to a kind of foreboding shudder
when even a clergyman begins to jest upon the borders of sacred things.
It is not humor that is irreverent, but the mind that gives it the wrong
turn. As we may be angry and not sin, so may we jest and not sin. But
there is a poor ambition to be married, which is, I fear, the thought
most present with too many young women. They feel as if their worth
remained unacknowledged, as if there were for them no place they could
call their own in society, until they find a man to take them under his
wing. She degrades womanhood who thinks thus of herself. It says ill for
the relation of father and mother if the young women of a family recoil
from the thought of being married, but it says ill for the relation of
parents and children if they are longing to be married.
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