THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5372, 15 June 1878, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND.

Of course, the most of you have been taught to look to marriage as the only fitting termination to a woman’s life. Whether it is so or not is a question wc willnot now stop to argue. I believe it to bo a matter of circumstance, disposition, and individual opinion. Some of you may come to agree with mo yet. We all feel sorely the need of infallible rules by which to judge one another in important matters, but particularly in this all-important relation. There is such a rule, only it is so seldom used as to be almost obsolete. It is a very simple one—just this :—Be sure to know, not tho reputation merely, but tho character of the man you propose to marry, and that, too, before you bind yourself by ever so slight a promise. Better suffer a “disappointment” before marriage than the bitterest and most lasting of disappointments afterwards. How are you to accomplish this? I will tell you. Make it your business to see him in his family, among his sisters, if he has any ; with his mother, it ho has the good fortune to possess one. If he is kind and gentle and manly in his treatment of them, you may rest assured he will be equally so towards the woman he chooses as his partner in life. When I say kind and gentle, I do not mean with that sort of gentleness with which one treats a petted child, that has in it a constant reminder of the weakness of the petted one—that is only the polite way many men have of expressing the sense of. their own superiority; an agreeable way, perhaps, but none the less insulting in its spirit—but that deference that one involuntarily shows to an' ■ equal. See him talking with other men ; he argues freely, submitting to criticism, modifying his opinions, and acknowledging his mistakes freely, because he feels on equal ground .with them. Now, watch him at home when a discussion comes up. If he retains the same unruffled manner, if he can acknowledge frankly the possibility of being mistaken, then he is manly as well as gentlemanly; for there is a difference between the two, I hold, and in my opinion, the former far outweighs the latter. Any ballroom popinjay, with his small brains in his heels, may be a gentleman in the vulgar acceptation of the word —and that is, he can talk small talk gracefully, will fly to lift your handkerchief, is profuse in compliment—those things are as much a matter of teaching as reading and writing—but true manhood is from within, and though it may not be quite so ready with the surface accomplishments of society, may even be entirely overshadowed by the pinchbeck of the first, yet has in it what is better far, the genuine spirit of Christ. And did it ever strike you how perfect was the gentle manhood as well as the manhood of Jesus ? That alone must have made him seem a king to such as were his followers, had he actually been no more. To the weak, the suffering, the most degraded, he was always the Prince ; only with the mean, false-hearted, and selfish did he ever become the judge. Choose, then, the man who can show you conscientiously that he is nearest the spirit of Christ in these two things, and your future will be an assured one.