"I often think," says Archdeacon Farrar, "that most of us in life are like many of those sight-seers who saunter through this (Westminster) Abbey. Their listless look upon its grandeur and its memorials furnishes an illustration of the aspect which we present to higher powers as we wander restlessly through the solemn minster-aisles of life.... We talk of human misery; how many of us derive from life one-tenth part of what God meant to be its natural blessedness? Sit out in the open air on a summer day, and how many of us have trained ourselves to notice the sweetness and the multiplicity of the influences which are combining for our delight--the song of birds; the breeze beating balm upon the forehead; the genial warmth; the delicate odour of ten thousand flowers?" What is said here of life in general is also true of married life. We go through the temple of Hymen without noticing, much less appreciating, its beauty. Certainly few people gain as much happiness from their marriage as they might. They expect to find happiness without taking any trouble to make it, or they are so selfishly preoccupied that they cannot enjoy. In this way many a husband and wife only begin to value each other when death is at hand to separate them. In married life sacrifices must be ever going on if we would be happy. It is the power to make another glad which lights up our own face with joy. It is the power to bear another's burden which lifts the load from our own heart. To foster with vigilant, self-denying care the development of another's life is the surest way to bring into our own joyous, stimulating energy. Bestow nothing, receive nothing; sow nothing, reap nothing; bear no burden of others, be crushed under your own. If many people are miserable though married, it is because they ignore the great law of self-sacrifice that runs through all nature, and expect blessedness from receiving rather than from giving. They reckon that they have a right to so much service, care, and tenderness from those who love them, instead of asking how much service, care, and tenderness they can give. No knowledge is so well worth acquiring as the science of living harmoniously for the most part of a life with another, which we might take as a definition of matrimony. This science teaches us to avoid fault-finding, bothering, boring, and other tormenting habits. "These are only trifling faults," you say. Yes, but trifles produce domestic misery, and domestic misery is no trifle. "Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from those trifles springs, Oh! let the ungentle spirit learn from thence, A _small_ unkindness is a _great_ offence. To give rich gifts perhaps we wish in vain, But all may shun the guilt of giving pain."