bought. Gold is power. It can sweep down forests, raise cities, build
roads, and deck houses; but wealth can not purchase love and the
affections of a wife. If any husband has failed to estimate the
affections of a true wife, he will be likely to mark their value in his
loss, when the heart that loved him is stilled by death. Is man the
child of sorrow, and do afflictions and distresses pour their
bitternesses into his cup? How are his trials alleviated, his sighs
suppressed, his corroding thoughts dissipated, his anxieties and fears
relieved, his gloom and depression chased away by her cheerfulness and
love! Is he overwhelmed by disappointments and mortified by reproaches?
There is one who can hide his faults from her eyes, and can love without
up-braiding.
A judicious wife is constantly exerting an influence for good over her
husband. She is, so to speak, the wielder of the moral pruning knife,
and is constantly snipping off from her husband's moral nature little
twigs that are growing in the wrong direction. Intellectual beings of
different sexes were surely intended by their Creator to go through the
world thus together, united not only in hand and heart, but in
principles, in intellect, in views, and in dispositions, each pursuing
one common and noble end—their own improvement and the happiness of
those around them by the different means appropriate to their situation,
mutually correcting, sustaining, and strengthening each other,
undegraded by all practices of tyranny on the one hand and deceit on the
other, each finding a candid but severe judge in the understanding, and
a warm and partial advocate in the heart, of their companion.
A great deal has been said in a cynical way about the immense number of
unhappy marriages. There is so much said on this subject that it is easy
to forget that for every instance of complaint there are thousands of
beneficent and prosperous unions of which the world never hears. It is
natural that the evil attracts the most attention. Men and women whose
married life is full of good and helpfulness do not often feel an
impulse to defend the system under which they live. Sometimes we hear
both sexes repine at their change, relate the happiness of their earlier
years, blame the folly and rashness of their own choice, and warn others
against the infatuation. But it is to be remembered that the days which
they so much wish to call back are the days not only of celibacy, but of
youth—the days of novelty and of improvement, of ardor and of hope, of
health and vigor of body, of gayety and lightness of heart. It is not
easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be
delightful; and we are afraid that, whether married or single, we shall
find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbersome the
longer it is worn.
It is human to see only the good side of any thing that is past and
gone. Life is so full of disappointments that whenever in mature years
we recall past days, our present state, being present reality, always
suffers by comparison with the past. It would be well to calmly reflect
on what happiness in married life depends. There is a great deal of
mischief wrought in the world by the common understanding of the phrase
"mismated." Many apparently act as if all the ills of married life could
be explained by a convenient use of that word.
It is arrogant folly to suppose that so much misery and wrong, so much
selfishness and cruelty, so much that is low, animal, and unlovely in
the lives of men and women, results from their being "mismated." They
have, in the majority of cases, mistaken the cause of their trouble.
These men and women are undeveloped, exacting, selfish, proud. They have
undisciplined tempers, and they are accustomed to think of happiness for
themselves as the chief end of marriage. No magic of "mating" would make
the lives of such people very high or perfect.
Nowhere does it prove so powerfully true as in married life, that your
happiness is found in consulting the happiness of another. We are too
prone to trust to specific treatment for particular evils. The real
problem of happiness in married life is not difficult of solution if
only sought with a spirit of willingness to learn the truths. There are
no short roads to happiness. The men and women who marry must somehow
acquire thoughtfulness, self-control, consideration for others,
patience, and the other qualities, without which life is unendurable in
any relations we know of. All candid persons will so readily admit this,
that marriage speedily becomes a school for the exercise of virtue, and
is the source and nurse of many of the best qualities in the life of man
or woman.
It is indeed wonderful that marriage does so much for them, and has such
power to lift up their lives to light and beauty. The man who remains
single to the end of his days can not well help growing cynical, cold,
and selfish. By nature he may be as warm-hearted, as full of generous
impulses, as any, but he has only himself to care for. He has never felt
the necessity of striving to make happy the life of another. He has
never known what it is to have a woman's heart, full of womanly
tenderness and strength, affection, sympathy, and encouragement, looking
to him for love and happiness, for protection and comfort; has never
learned the lesson of patience as it is learned in bearing with the
faults of a loved one. He has never known what it is to have a little
child turn to him as the source of consolation for its childish troubles
and sorrows. It can not but follow that, lacking all the bitter-sweet
experience of married life, he shall in that degree fail of being a
complete man.
True, there are natures that, whether married or single, would only
develop into the cold, hard-hearted disposition; but that does not at
all detract from the fact that marriage does thus tend to make life more
replete with kindness and manly attributes than celibacy. Every man
feels the need of a home, and there is no more sorrowful sight than to
see a man bent with the weight of years, who is homeless and has no
friends united to him by family ties. There can not be a home without
the institution of marriage. Think for a moment how much of the joy and
sorrow of life is connected with the word home. What visions of hopes,
what days of joy, what seasons of sorrow, does it not recall? All the
lights and shades of life originate from thence. How, then, can a man or
woman lacking the experience of home and married life possess the
strength of character, the full and complete development, expected from
those who have taken upon themselves the joys and sorrows, the cross and
crown of matrimony?
[Illustration: DUTIES OF MARRIED LIFE.]
[Illustration]
Happiness in life is of such momentous importance that it becomes all to
study well the conditions of happiness, and to none does this truth
apply itself with greater force than to those who have taken upon
themselves the duties of matrimony. It is vain and useless now to ponder
the wisdom and propriety of the choice. The step has been taken, and it
only remains now to take up the duties thus voluntarily assumed, and, in
the due performance of the same, do what is in their power to gather the
happiness with which God, in his goodness, has invested the marriage
relation.
Husbands and wives should learn to live happily together, for the lesson
_can_ be learned. By living happily together we do not understand a
calm, passive existence, unbroken by a single dissenting word or look,
because persons are incapacitated for happiness who can adapt themselves
to such an impotent existence. Occasional differences of opinion
indicate mutual vitality, and, when backed by common sense and
self-control, are no drawbacks to a peaceful life. But in all vital
points of mutual interest husband and wife should agree perfectly,
understanding that their interests are mutual, and that in every sense
of the word they are one.
Life is real, and our every-day wants and desires remain the same after
as before marriage. All the infirmities of our nature must still be
fought against. The marriage ceremony does not do away with the
necessity of self-control; the passions still have to be subdued, and a
careful watch maintained against hasty words and actions. Many, in
failing to recognize these truths, are laying the foundation for future
unhappiness. It is so easy to imagine that the loved one is all
perfection, and when the soul is filled with the sweet influence of love
it is so easy to think that this is sufficient for all the ills of life,
that now these two "harps of a thousand strings" will henceforth always
be attuned to each other, and thus, ignoring the fact that human nature
is extremely frail, forget to strengthen it by the exercise of
reflection and judgment, fail to summon to their aid consideration and a
disposition to bear and forbear, suddenly awaken to the fact that life
has ever its trials, and that—
"For the busiest day some duty waits."
They then learn that happiness comes only as the result of persistent
following in the paths of duty, that no ceremony or rite can change
their nature, that the plain rules of courtesy and kindness,
consideration and respect, are as necessary now as in the Spring-time of
love.
Love on both sides and all things equal in outward circumstances are not
all the requisites of domestic felicity. Young people seldom court in
their every-day dress, but they must put it on after marriage. As in
other bargains but few expose defects. They are apt to marry faultless.
Love is blind, but faults are there and will come out. The fastidious
attentions of wooing are like Spring flowers—they make pretty nosegays,
but poor greens. The beautiful romance with which so many have invested
the morning-time of wedded life is apt to wear off under the burden and
heat of its noon. That this should not be so all will admit; that wedded
love, like the river running to the ocean, should grow in magnitude as
it rolls through life should, no doubt, be the result of all well-lived
matrimonial lives. But, from the constitution and nature of man, such,
unfortunately, is not always the case. The honeymoon, at times, gets an
unexpected dash of vinegar, and at last it disappears altogether in the
prosaic duties of home life. This is the trying hour of married life.
Between the parties there can be no more illusions. The deceptions of
courtship are no longer of avail.
Right here is the chance to make or mar the happiness of life. Why not
look the matter plainly in the face? Why not recognize the fact that
life is not romance? It is a real thing, and altogether too precious to
be thrown away in secret regrets or open indifference. It is your duty
now to begin the duty or adaptation. If you have neglected to study the
conditions of happiness heretofore begin at once to do so. If you have
been derelict in duty resolve to do your share now. If you find you do
not love each other as you thought you did double your attentions to
each other, and be zealous of any thing which tends in the slightest way
to separate you. Acknowledge your faults to one another, and determine
that henceforth you will be all in all to each other. There is no other
way for you to do. It is not too late for you to look for happiness. You
are yet young. It is folly to expect naught but disappointment the rest
of your life.
The fault is in human nature, and, like most faults, has a remedy. It is
well to study for the remedy, for the man or woman who has settled down
on the conviction that he or she is attached for life to an uncongenial
mate, and that there is no way of escape, has lost life; there is no
effort too costly to make which can restore the missing pearl to its
setting upon the bosom. No doubt much of the unhappiness of married life
would be saved if only the sober views of life and duty were more
carefully considered before marriage. If only every couple would
consider that over against every joy stands a duty, and that tears and
smiles alternate with each other through life, they would save
themselves much disappointments. It is not too late, however, to begin;
and so, if this truth be not recognized before marriage, do not delay an
instant when once stern facts have withdrawn the pleasing illusions with
which an untaught fancy invested matrimony, and life, with its duties as
well as its pleasures, appears to your view.
It has always seemed to us that much of the danger of home life springs
from its familiarity; that in the intimate relations of husband and wife
the parties are too apt to forget the claims of courtesy which are
constantly pressing upon them. While there should be no strictness of
formal etiquette between the parties, it is none the less true that,
since life is made up of forms and ceremonies, and much of the pleasures
of life depend on the due observance of the same, that a spirit of
courtesy should constantly exist between husband and wife. Before
marriage each would be cautious of a breach of manners, and would strive
to demean themselves as became ladies and gentlemen. Are not the claims
of courtesy just as pressing now as ever? Has the marriage ceremony
given you any right to be less than polite? And, in a still higher
sense, when you reflect that true courtesy is ever accompanied by the
spirit of kindness and a dignity of carriage the more pressing are its
claims.
It is difficult to conceive of any station in life where the exercise of
patience is not imperatively demanded. All life is effectually teaching
and emphasizing this lesson of patience. But marriage affords a field
where too great an importance can not be attached to it. Its claims are
fresh every morning and new every evening, and it were difficult to
conceive of any thing which had more to do with home happiness than
bearing patiently the innumerable vexations which are constantly thrown
in your path. Every coupled pair flatter themselves that their
experience will be better aid more excellent than that of many who have
gone before them. They look with amazement at the coldness,
complainings, and dissatisfaction which spoil the comfort of so many,
homes as at things which can not by any possibility fall to their
happier lot. But like causes produce like effects, and to avoid the
misfortune of others we must avoid their mistakes.
The acquaintance of courtship is a very one-sided affair, both parties
seeing through the peculiar atmosphere which magnifies virtue, changes
defects into beauties, and makes the discovery of faults impossible. The
discovery will certainly come, and those who had thought each other next
to perfection will soon discover that some few imperfections and the
common weaknesses of humanity remain. Disappointment is felt where there
is no just reason for it. They had thought they were perfectly adapted
to each other, and that mutual concessions would involve no self-denial,
and that whatever either desired the other would instantly yield. But
experience teaches that the work of mutual adaptation is precisely what
they have to learn, to understand each other's peculiarities and tastes,
weaknesses and excellencies, and by self-discipline and kindness of
construction on both sides to receive and impart a modifying influence,
bringing them nearer each other all the time, until through this
interchangeable moral and spiritual culture the hopes of happiness are
fully realized.
But this happy result, which is unquestionably the highest earth
affords, depends in a great degree upon the manner in which the first
few years of married life are spent, and the success with which its
first unavoidable trials are met and overcome. Some allow themselves to
lose sight of the great truth that happiness is surest found in
consulting the happiness of others. The husband should have as his great
object and rule of conduct the happiness of his wife. Of that happiness
the confidence in his affection is the chief element; and the proofs of
this affection on his part, therefore, constitute his chief duty. An
affection that shows itself not in caresses alone, as if these were the
only demonstration of love, but of that respect which distinguishes love
as a principle, from that brief passion which assumes, and only assumes,
the name—a respect which consults the judgment as well as the wishes of
the object beloved, which considers her who is worthy of being taken to
the heart as worthy of being admitted to all the counsels of the head.
Do not forget that your happiness both here and hereafter depends upon
each other's influence. An unkind word or look, or an unintentional
neglect sometimes lead to thoughts which ripen into the ruin of body and
soul. A spirit of forbearance, patience, and kindness, and a
determination to keep the chain of love bright, are likely to develop
corresponding qualities, and to make the rough places of life smooth and
pleasant. Have you seriously reflected that it is in the power of either
of you to make the other utterly miserable? And when the storms and
trials of life come, for come they will, how much either of you can do
to calm, to elevate, to purify the troubled spirit of the other, and
change clouds for sunshine!
It is emphatically the duty of all who have entered into marriage to
strive to forget self, and in furthering the happiness of the other to
advance their own; ever remembering that, even though attended with the
fairest of outward prospects, infirmity is inseparably bound up with
your very nature, and that in bearing one another's burdens you are
fulfilling one of the highest duties of the union. Love in marriage can
not subsist unless it be mutual; and where love can not be there can be
left of wedlock nothing but the empty husk of an outside matrimony, as
undelightful and as unpleasing to God as any other kind of hypocrisy.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: TRIALS OF MARRIED LIFE.]
[Illustration]
We celebrate the wedding and make merry over the honeymoon. The poet
paints the beauties and blushes of the blooming bride; and the bark of
matrimony, with its freight of untested love, is launched on the sea of
experiment, amid kind wishes and rejoicing. But on that precarious sea
are many storms, and even the calm has its perils; and only when the
bark has weathered these, and landed its cargo in the haven of domestic
peace, can we pronounce the voyage prosperous and congratulate on their
merited and enviable reward.
As long as human nature is what it is, we must expect that life of any
kind will abound in trials. To conceive of a life utterly devoid of
these is to conceive of a vegetative kind of existence. Trials, then,
are to be expected, and they must be overcome. This is none the less
true of married life. Marriages may be celebrated in bowers as fair as
those of Eden, but they must be proved and put to test in the workshops
of the world. And as each state of existence has its peculiar trials and
cares, we need not be disappointed when experience teaches that, though
marriage hath indeed great joys, it has also its trials and vexations.
In prosaic, every-day life romantic minds are speedily sobered down, and
the gloss of pretension is soon worn off. Hands that have heretofore
seen no harder work than to entice strains of music from ivory keys,
perhaps find themselves engaged in the less poetical, but equally as
praiseworthy, occupation of mixing bread, or in the performance of other
plain household duties which require to be dispatched, not by angels,
but by women. And the possessor of faultless clothes and a silken
mustache finds himself weighed down with altogether different burdens
than those of holding fans and carrying parasols; and he is called upon
to solve other questions than those relating to social etiquette.
Courtship is to many a dreamy resting-place betwixt the joys of youth
and the cares of maturity. Under the light of hope married life is
nearly always a land of rainbows to the youth; but, as to produce the
rainbow it requires the falling rain as well as the shining sun, so,
when the nature of these prospective joys is carefully investigated, it
will not surprise one to find that trials and duties are interposed
between their present stand-point and the pure happiness of domestic
life.
To many a young couple, when life's realities come, come also the
discovery of traits of character in each other which perfectly astonish
them. Every day reveals something new and something unpleasant. The
courtship character slowly fades away, and, with sorrow be it said, too
often the courtship love as well. Now comes disappointment, sorrow,
regret. They find that their characters are entirely dissimilar; they
also awake to the fact that married life is full of cares, vexations,
and disappointments. This, indeed, should have been expected; but it is
human to see naught but joys in the future, especially from the
stand-point of youth. This discovery often shipwrecks the happiness of
the unfortunate couple.
We have all seen the trees die in Summer-time. But the tree, with its
whispering leaves and swaying limbs, its greenness, its umbrage, where
the shadows lie hidden all the day, does not die all at once. First a
dimness creeps over its brightness; next a leaf sickens here and there,
and fades; next a whole bough feels the palsying touch of coming death;
and finally the feeble signs of sickly life, visible here and there, all
disappear, and the dead trunk holds out its stripped, stark limbs, a
melancholy ruin. Just so does wedded love sometimes die. Wedded love,
blessed with the prayers of friends, hallowed by the sanction of God,
rosy with present joys, and radiant with future hopes, it dies not all
at once. A hasty word casts a shadow upon it, and the shadow deepens
with the sharp reply. A little thoughtlessness misconstrued, a
little unintentional negligence, deemed real, a little word
misinterpreted,—through such small channels do dissension and sorrow
enter the family circle. Love becomes reticent, confidence is chilled,
and noiselessly but surely the work of separation goes on, until the two
are left as isolated as the pyramids, nothing remaining of the union but
the legal form—the dead trunk of the tree, whose branches once waved in
the sunlight. Is it not a melancholy reflection on human nature that
petty trials and difficulties, from which no life is free, should have
wrought such a startling effect?
The great secret is to learn to bear with each other's failings; not to
be blind to them—that were either an impossibility or a folly. We must
see and feel them; if we do neither, they are not evils to us, and there
is obviously no need of forbearance. We are to throw the mantle of
charity around them, concealing them from the curious gaze of others; to
determine not to let them chill the affections. Surely it is not the
perfections, but the imperfections, of human character that make the
strongest claims on our love.
All the world must approve and even enemies must admire the good and the
estimable in human nature. If husband and wife estimate only that in
each which all must be constrained to value, what do they more than
others? It is the infirmities of character, imperfections of nature,
that call for pitying sympathy, the tender compassion that makes each
the comforter, the monitor of the other. Forbearance helps each to
attain command over themselves. This forbearance is not a weak and
wicked indulgence of each other's faults, but such a calm, tender
observation of them as excludes all harshness and anger, and takes the
best and fullest method of pointing them out in the full confidence of
affection.
It should be remembered that trials and sufferings are the real test of
merit in all life, as they bring out the real character. In married life
husband and wife are often adapted to each other through trials, and the
closest union is often wrought by suffering, even as iron is welded by
heat. As much of the happiness of real life is artificial, so many
things in wedded life that to third persons must seem as trials are,
after all, only the sweetness of domestic life. How many couples, now in
mature life and surrounded by luxury and all the comforts of wealth,
look back to the days of early privation as amongst the happiest days of
their life! Succeeding years have brought them wealth, but it took with
them their domestic happiness.