We do not hear of a Wellington or a Roberts refusing to enter the service because they could not give up their independence.

Our military heroes at least know that it is through discipline and obedience that they gain their real independence--the independence of a strong character.
Again, our girls need to be taught not only that there is nothing derogatory in the married relation to the freest and fullest independence of character, but surely in these days of open advocacy by some popular writers of "les unions libres" and a freedom of divorce that comes to much the same thing, they need to be taught the sanctity of marriage--those first principles which hitherto we have taken for granted, but which now, like everything else, is thrown into the crucible and brought into question.

They need definite teaching as to the true nature of marriage; that it is no mere contract to be broken or kept according to the individual contractor's convenience--I never yet heard of a contract for bringing into existence, not a successful machine, but a moral and spiritual being with infinite possibilities of weal or woe, of heaven or hell--but a sacramental union of love and life, with sacramental grace given to those who will seek it to live happily and endure nobly within its sacred bounds--a union so deep and mystical that even on its physical side our great physiologists are wholly at a loss to account for some of its effects;[34] a union of which permanence is the very essence, as on its permanence rests the permanence and stability of the whole fabric of our life.

It can never be treated on an individualistic basis, though that is always the tendency with every man and woman who has ever loved.

In Mrs.Humphry Ward's words: "That is always the way; each man imagines the matter is still for his deciding, and he can no more decide it than he can tamper with the fact that fire burns or water drowns.