It is not work that hurts men. It is the corrosion of uncertainty; it
is the anticipation of trouble; it is living in a state of painful
apprehension. Therefore we should endeavor to rise out of the
atmosphere of gloomy forebodings. The man who is lifted above fear and
its whole brood of mischief can go through twice as much trouble as a
man who is subject to its influence.
He that looks out upon life from a sour or severe disposition, with
hard and stringent notions, is ill prepared to meet the experiences of
the world; but he who has the sweetness of hope, he who has an
imagination lit up with cheerfulness, he who has the sense of humor
which softens all things--he who has this atmosphere of the mind--has
made himself superior to accident. As the angel described by Milton,
who was smitten by the sword, and whose wounds healed as soon as the
sword was withdrawn, so ought man to be; and when he receives a spear
thrust in life, no sooner should the spear be withdrawn than his flesh
ought to "close and be itself again."
A married man falling into misfortune is more apt to retrieve his
situation in the world than a single one, chiefly because his spirits
are soothed and retrieved by domestic endearments, and his self-respect
kept alive by finding that, although all abroad is darkness and
humiliation, yet there is a little world of love at home over which he
is monarch.
HUSBAND AND FATHER
Miss Frances Power Cobb is right, and she is wrong, when she says: "It
is a woman, and only a woman--a woman all by herself, if she likes, and
without any man to help her--who can turn a house into a home." She is
unquestionably right in her judgment, that it is a woman who can, if
she will, turn a house into a home, but she is much in the wrong in her
assertion that it is a woman all by herself, without any man to help
her, who can effect such a beneficial transformation. Woman possesses
magical powers in the way of building up a home; but home naturally
implies the presence and protection of man--and it is man himself, if
he likes, and without any woman to help him, who can give that home a
semblance of that place where, as some people believe, the wicked
suffer after they have "shuffled off this mortal coil." The husband
can never make the home, but he can succeed most admirably, if so he
choose, to unmake it, to banish its happiness and comfort, to exile
from it its ministering angels of peace and content, to shatter woman's
sweet and blessed work to its very foundation. Let the wife
concentrate, all day long, all her care and ingenuity and love upon
building up her little paradise at home, let her hands be ever so busy
in strewing fresh flowers around the domestic hearth, let her heart be
ever so happy throughout the day in the discharge of her domestic
duties, let her countenance be ever so beaming in her sweet
anticipation of the happy smile of appreciation, of the kind word of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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