There is that first, initiatory picture of home which throngs in ideal beauty the souls of the young, in which young love and hope plight their troth, join their hands, hearts, fortunes, in a wedlock that is auroral in its glad promises. The youthful pair, started together on the voyage of life, with their everything on their ideal bark, are all the world to each other, and that world centers in their thought, in the home they are going to make, and have and enjoy together. In their holy trust, they confide everything to each other. Nothing is kept back. Nothing is so personal, so secret, so dear to self, that is withheld. Every personal charm, purpose, element of character, yields to the consecrated union. Body and soul, with their aims and possessions, are surrendered, and the twain become one in the marvel, mystery, and blessedness of holy wedlock. In the entrancement of their new found joy, they initiate their movement for a new home under the radiant bow of a thousand blissful hopes. This strange, bewildering blending of two persons in one, so unlike anything else in life, so without analogy as to stand alone, the one experience in the white light of trust and hope, is the initiatory movement to the home which is the central and all-powerful institution of human society. Blessed be the young heart, that is capable of such self-surrender, such trust, and love and hope, such beginning anew of life with changed certainties, aims, and prospects, that it is capable of putting such a picture upon the canvas of real life.

How this picture of the beginning of home hangs in the memory of married people a thing of beauty forever! No matter how humble, it is colored with the hues of its own peculiar brightness. Even the most prosaic think of it with a touch of emotion. In romance and poetry, as well as in real life, it will continue to be, as it has always been, the key note in the wondrous psalm of human life. Explain it, we cannot. It baffles philosophy. It makes one life out of two and yet leaves the two to flow on together side by side, both of them changed and neither lost--joined and yet separate--two and yet one--both the same and yet both different from what they were,--something of self surrendered and something of the other taken on,--a new life begun and yet the old still continuing--a new realm of being created. It is possible only because the Lord made it so. It is an ordained part of human development--a part of the mystery of our enigmatical growth. It is a proof that neither man nor woman is a completed being alone, that the two together in the wedded relation, modified and molded by their union, complete the Divine design in their creation. Made for each other, parts of a dual pair, longing for each other when separate, happy in each other when properly married, modifying each other when so united by a subtle chemistry of the spirit which no science can explain, producing together a new kingdom of life, realizing in their combined oneness, intelligent, moral, and spiritual results richer and completer than are otherwise known, they are in this physical and spiritual adaptedness to each other, a proof of having been made for each other by an intelligent Creator who comprehends and approves their love and who ordained that love to fulfill some great purposes of their existence. An atheistic lover is an absurdity. Marriage is an illustration and enforcement of the Divine thought in man, and therefore proves that he is the work of a Maker. This view compels the acceptance of marriage as divinely ordained and home as a divine institution, and the family as a divine society. It puts this whole matter of which we are writing, and which fill such a great place in human society, into the category of things directly of God and which are among the things He providentially directs. ::Read Marriage Part II::