IDEAL MARRIAGES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 427, 22 August 1908, Page 4

IDEAL MARRIAGES.

Father Vaughan’s Advice to Girls.

Father Vaughan continued his series of sermons on “ Maniage,” preached at Farm Street, on the morning of Sunday, June 21st. He said that to him London presented a truly strange picture. “ The West seemed given up to women, the East to children, and the City to men.”

To be present at the discourse of the eloquent Jesuit Father there was an extraordinary crush to secure even standing room. Carriages, motors, and hansoms thronged the street, and the congregation, a notably fashionable one, began to gather two and a half hours before the time announced for the sermon.

The branch of his subject dealt w T ith by the preacher was “ Parent and Child,” the text being “ What manner of child shall this be?” (Luke i., 66). Father Vaughan said he was repeatedly asked why marriages, seeing young people moved about so much, in the present day, were not increasing ? People did go out now far more than a generation ago, but it was not so much with the idea of getting married as of being amused. The man who was seriously thinking of choosing a wife, as a rule, did not go to the marriage market for what he wanted. He preferred his peach sun-warmed, with the bloom upon it, unplucked, untouched amid the foliage of the present tree.

No doubt some men were too selfish, too self-centred, to think of sharing their life with another. Then, again, there were those who felt it would never do to attempt wedded life with a girl for whom the best was scarcely good enough ; whilst he knew men who, when urged to marry, to reply cynically, “It is too late; I have seen too much in town and country ; I do not believe in it. It is a bilateral contract legalising what is worse than divorce,” Outside the Catholic Church most girls, no matter what they might say to the contrary, longed to get married. While man waited for the wife, woman watched for a husband. To women who were anxious for husbands he would like to say, “ Do not seem to be quite so anxious, and still less give as a reason how unhappy you are at home.” The debutante who played her part with a view of entrapping a husband would fail, for, though her sought-for prize might take advantage of her for his own ends, his wife she would become never. It might be well to remember that happy marriages came not of beautiful figures, faces, or fortunes, but of beautiful characters.