Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/149

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MARRIAGE.
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the respect and happiness of your wife, will prove more salutary than stolid indifference or jealousy, in prolonging her smiles and health. Husbands, hear this, and always remember how slight a word may retain the old trysting-times.

It is too late, after marriage, to grumble over incompatibility of dispositions. A mutual understanding should exist before, and continue ever after, this union. Deception is fatal to happiness.

The nuptial vow should never be annulled, so long as its moral obligations are kept intact; but the frequency of divorce shows the sacredness of this relation to be losing its Puritanical character, and that some fatal mistake is undermining its foundation.

Separation takes place only when the motives for marriage are not suited to individual progress and happiness. Science inevitably lifts one's being higher in the scale of harmony and happiness, and must ultimately break all shackles that fetter those who are ready for advancement.

Kindred tastes, motives, and aspirations are necessary to the formation of a happy and permanent companionship. The beautiful in character is the good, welding the indissoluble links of affection.

A mother's affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes Purity and Truth, both of which are immortal. Therefore this maternal affection lives on, under whatever difficulties.

From the very logic of events we learn that selfishness and impurity alone are fleeting, and that Wisdom will ultimately put asunder what she hath not joined together.