CHAPTER V.

THE WEDDING RING.

HE custom of wearing the wedding ring on

the fourth finger of the left hand had its origin with the Egyptians, from whom the Greeks borrowed the custom, and handed it to the Romans. The fourth finger was dedicated to Apollo. Gold was a symbol of the sun. It was believed that Apollo's fourth finger was connected by a nerve directly to the heart, and it was therefore considered more appropriate that the sign of loving union should rest on this finger.

Since the earliest days of Christianity, the ring has been a precious pledge of faithfulness. The man who gives the ring binds himself by all that is holy to be good and true. The golden circle upon a woman's hand sets her apart from all other women she is a crowned queen.

In the wedding ring the wife pledges loving

45

reverence. No true woman wants a husband into whose face she cannot look with pride, and on whose arm she cannot lean with implicit confidence. Ovid says: "If you wish to marry suitably, marry your equal." Now and then a woman of great force of character may lift her husband upward, but she accepts such a labor at the risk of her own higher life. True are the words of Tennyson in Locksley Hall:

Thou shalt lower to his level day by day,

What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.

As the husband, so the wife is: thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have power to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

The ring pledges faithfulness. When doubt comes in at the door love flies out at the window. The basis of all true affection is confidence confidence not only in the woman's