If marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?
I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching of modern fiction--even of so great a novelist as George Meredith--which inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the higher law of love, or rather, passion.

In teaching your sons, and especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but on duty.

To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind.

There is but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built--duty.

When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the, most imperfect marriage prove in the end to be happy and contented.
Here again I quote some words of Mrs.Humphry Ward, which she puts into the mouth of her hero: "No," he said with deep emphasis--"No; I have come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better worth having than what people call an 'ideal passion'-- if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its own weakness,"[36] I am aware that neither Mr.Grant Allen with his "hill-top" novels, nor Mrs.Mona Caird need be taken too seriously, but when the latter says, "There is something pathetically absurd in this sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown people,"[37] I would suggest that it would be still more pathetically absurd to see the whole upward-striving past, the whole noble future of the human race, sacrificed to their unruly wills and affections, their passions and desires.