heedless manners towards a WIFE? Has he not chosen her? Has he not declared his preference? Are not the vows of God upon him? Is she not the chief relation he possesses on earth?

The honour of CONFIDENCE. You are not to proceed without their knowledge and advice. In many cases their opinion may be preferable to your own. Their judgment may be less clouded by interest: they stand back from the object, you are too near; they are cool and calm, you, by being in the scene, are ruffled, and inflamed.

The honour of MAINTENANCE. You are to provide for them, and enable them to appear becoming their rank and situation in life.-What can we think of the man who squanders away his substance upon his lewd or his drunken appetites, reduces his wife to a drudge, and suffers her with her babes to struggle with the hardships of penury, unable to procure a sufficiency of food, or raiment?-"If any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel."

THE WIFE'S AFFECTIONATE PLEA.

What is the language of these circumstances?Honour us; deal kindly with us. From many of the opportunities and means by which you procure favourable notice, we are excluded. Doomed to the shades, few of the high places of the earth are open to us. Alternately we are adored and oppressed. From our slaves, you become our tyrants. You feel our beauty, and avail yourselves of our weakness. You complain of our inferiority, but none of your behaviour bids us rise. Sensibility has given us a thousand feelings, which nature has kindly denied you.-Always under restraints, we have little liberty of choice. Providence seems to have been more attentive to enable us to confer happiness, than to enjoy it.-Every condition has for us fresh mortifications; every relation new sorrows. We enter social bonds; it is a system of perpetual sacrifice. We cannot give life to others, without hazarding our own. We have sufferings which you do not share, cannot share.-If spared, years, and decays invade our charms, and much of the ardour pro

duced by attraction departs with it. We may die.The grave covers us, and we are soon forgotten: soon are the days of your mourning ended, soon is our loss repaired dismissed even from your speech, our name is to be heard no more-a successor may dislike it. Our children, after having a mother by nature, may fall under the control of a mother by affinity, and be mortified by distinctions made between them, and her own offspring.-Though the duties which we have discharged invariably, be the most important and necessary, they do not shine: they are too common to strike: they procure no celebrity: the wife, the mother fills no historic page. Our privations, our confinements, our wearisome days, our interrupted, our sleepless nights, the hours we have hung in anxious watchings over your sick and dying offspring."

CHAPTER III.

THE HONOUR AND LOVE WOMAN DEMANDS.

WOMAN made for man, to be his companion and cosharer of the joys or sorrows of his life, was designed to be the special object of his love and honour. Towards her his dearest and warmest affections must flow, in her he is to behold the most precious object of his esteem and delight. Affection is to be the base of the fabric and esteem the structure which he is to rear on it.

Intense love is needful in a relationship which is to be so close as to make of two persons one flesh. Intimacy so close, fellowship and intercourse so incessant would dwindle into a familiarity and negligent contempt, if not thoroughly allied to the fondest affection and delight. But when thus cemented by the out

bursting feelings of warm-hearted love, then there rises from it the most elevated esteem, and the most sacred honor and regard. Yes, the love that God approves is to be in every sense equal to that which a man has for himself. He is to love his wife as his own flesh. And then he is to honor, in every possible way, the object of his earnest and devoted attachment.

If she, by virtue of her more impassioned nature, more than reciprocates his manly affection, then is he to recognise this, and by exalted emotions to show his estimate of it. Her name, her offices, her duties, her anxieties are all to have his esteem and honorable regard. Nothing that concerns her can be indifferent to him, and it will be his highest delight to be found increasing her influence, and manifesting the sense he entertains of her excellence and worth.

This honour, however, will have regard to her mind and moral character, as well as to her outward form or physical nature. He will honour the woman—the helpmeet, the wife, the companion, the transcript of himself, and in all things worthy to dwell in his heart, and to be the desire of his eyes, and nothing inferior except in feminine delicacy and weakness, calling more loudly for his manly regard and affectionate care.