MY WIFE AND I. [Sidenote: Limit of responsibility.] One part of the science of living is to learn just what our own responsibility is, and to let other people’s alone. * * * * * [Sidenote: Starved faculties.] People don’t realize what it is to starve faculties; they understand physical starvation, but the slow fainting and dying of desires and capabilities for want of anything to feed upon, the withering of powers for want of exercise, is what they do not understand. * * * * * [Sidenote: Idealizing our work.] The chief evil of poverty is the crushing of ideality out of life, taking away its poetry and substituting hard prose;—and this, with them, was impossible. My father loved the work he did as the artist loves his painting, and the sculptor his chisel. A man needs less money when he is doing only what he loves to do—what, in fact, he _must_ do,—pay or no pay.... My mother, from her deep spiritual nature, was one soul with my father in his life-work. With the moral organization of a prophetess she stood nearer to heaven than he, and looking in told him what she saw, and he, holding her hand, felt the thrill of celestial electricity. * * * * * [Sidenote: True greatness.] “I want you to be a good man. A great many have tried to be great men, and failed, but nobody ever sincerely tried to be a _good_ man and failed.” * * * * * [Sidenote: Lack of religious instruction.] But I speak from experience when I say that the course of study in Christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and overloaded with all other studies that there is no probability that he will find the time or the inclination for such (religious) investigations. * * * * * [Sidenote: Educating boys for husbands.] In our days we have heard much said of the importance of training women to be wives. Is there not something to be said on the importance of training men to be husbands? Is the wide latitude of thought and reading and expression which has been accorded as a matter of course to the boy and the young man, the conventionally allowed familiarity with coarseness and indelicacy, a fair preparation to enable him to be the intimate companion of a pure woman? For how many ages has it been the doctrine that man and woman were to meet in marriage, the one crystal-pure, the other foul with the permitted garbage of all sorts of uncleansed literature and license? If the man is to be the head of the woman, even as Christ is the head of the Church, should he not be her equal, at least, in purity? * * * * * [Sidenote: Moral courage.] The pain-giving power is a most necessary part of a well-organized human being. Nobody can ever do anything without the courage to be disagreeable at times.