8.  THE SAFE RULE.—­Do not be in a hurry; take your time and consider well before you allow your devotion to rule you.  Study first your character, then study the character of her whom you desire to marry.  Love works mysteriously, and if it will bear careful and cool investigation, it will no doubt thrive under adversity.  When people marry they unite their destinies for the better or the worse.  Marriage is a contract for life and will never bear a hasty conclusion. Never be in a hurry!

* * * * *

JEALOUSY—­ITS CAUSE AND CURE.

  Trifles, light as air
  Are to the jealous confirmations strong,
  As proofs of holy writ.—­SHAKESPEARE.

  Nor Jealousy
  Was understood, the injur’d lover’s hell.—­MILTON

  O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
  It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
  The meat it feeds on.—­SHAKESPEARE.

1.  DEFINITION.—­Jealousy is an accidental passion, for which the faculty indeed is unborn.  In its nobler form and in its nobler motives it arises from love, and in its lower form it arises from the deepest and darkest Pit of Satan.

2.  HOW DEVELOPED.—­Jealousy arises either from weakness, which from a sense of its own want of lovable qualities is not convinced of being sure of its cause, or from distrust, which thinks the beloved person capable of infidelity.  Sometimes all these motives may act together.

3.  NOBLEST JEALOUSY.—­The noblest jealousy, if the term noble is appropriate, is a sort of ambition or pride of the loving person who feels it is an insult that another one should assume it as possible to supplant his love, or it is the highest degree of devotion which sees a declaration of its object in the foreign invasion, as it were, of his own altar.  Jealousy is always a sign that a little more wisdom might adorn the individual without harm.

4.  THE LOWEST JEALOUSY.—­The lowest species of jealousy is a sort of avarice of envy which, without being capable of love, at least wishes to possess the object of its jealousy alone by the one party assuming a sort of property right over the other.  This jealousy, which might be called the Satanic, is generally to be found with old withered “husbands,” whom the devil has prompted to marry young women and who forthwith dream night and day of cuck-old’s horns.  These Argus-eyed keepers are no longer capable of any feeling that could be called love, they are rather as a rule heartless house-tyrants, and are in constant dread that some one may admire or appreciate his unfortunate slave.

5.  WANT OF LORE.—­The general conclusion will be that jealousy is more the result of wrong conditions which cause uncongenial unions, and which through moral corruption artificially create distrust than a necessary accompaniment of love.

[Illustration:  SEEKING THE LIFE OF A RIVAL.]