keep the hedge between you. So do not take a husband until you are sure he is sober and steady.
The future of your lives, my dear young friends, much depends upon your careful, your modest, your cautious conduct with regard to this great subject. It is a subject that is often laughed about. When you talk about sweethearting everybody begins to laugh. But sweethearting for a few months means living together in a small cottage for twenty or thirty years, and that is a very serious thing. You may depend upon it, it is an unsafe undertaking to say that you will take a man for better for worse, for richer for poorer, and be his companion for life, unless you are pretty certain that he is a God-fearing man. That is the basis of all. Let a man have the love of God in his heart; let his life be conducted in the fear of God; let it be clear that his whole life is enlightened by the light of God; and then it will be safe to live with that man as your husband. The love of God and the love of man—they ever go together. Jesus Christ said that the first commandment was to love God; and that the second was like unto it, to love thy neighbour as thyself. Therefore if a man professes to love you, first be sure that he loves God; and if he
