" [Footnote:
Thoreau.]
"God has set the type of marriage everywhere throughout the creation.
Each creature seeks its perfection in another. The very heavens and
earth picture it to us." [Footnote: Luther.]
Youths and maidens, you are in the heyday of vigorous, joyous life!
Your delight is, like the springtime, rich in hope and promise. Your
laugh rings true; your voices mingle in frolic glee, or in quiet tones
of kind regard. Now join hands in the glad though earnest work of
life,--not life's drudgery, not its toils. No! for the cheer of your
spirits, the courage which looks despair full in the face, and crushes
it with lively endeavor,--these will permit no drudgery; these will
make out of the most desolate moorland a very garden of life!
You can do _all_! Now make the earth renew its vigor; now make
health and courage come again in the world; now restore the reign of
cheer; now break the bonds of vice; now bring back an earthly Paradise!
With your strong bodies, your glad hearts, your vigorous minds, your
imperial sway over the hearts of one another, your persuasive control
over the feelings of your elders, it is for you to make the future
what you will. Oh, make it the dawn of that civilization, of that
Christianity, when again "the morning stars shall sing together!"
Only you can restore virtue; only you can cast out corruption; only
you can drive the fiends of intemperance, of fraud, of oppression,
of despair, of craftiness, of selfishness, from the land!
Girls, in the great work of the future, in the reformation of the
present, can you not do most? When woman was thrust out of Paradise,
man followed her.
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