The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating MatrimonyTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating Matrimony
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Marriage
First, I counsel the wife to remember in what a severe and terrific
battle of life her husband is engaged. Whether in professional, or
commercial, or artistic, or mechanical life, your husband from morning
to night is in a Solferino, if not a Sedan. It is a wonder that your
husband has any nerves or patience or suavity left. To get a living in
this next to the last decade of the nineteenth century is a struggle.
If he come home and sit down preoccupied, you ought to excuse him. If
he do not feel like going out that night for a walk or entertainment,
remember he has been out all day. You say he ought to leave at his
place of business his annoyances and come home cheery. But if a man
has been betrayed by a business partner, or a customer has cheated him
out of a large bill of goods, or a protested note has been flung on
his desk, or somebody has called him a liar, and everything has gone
wrong from morning till night, he must have great genius and
forgetfulness if he do not bring some of the perplexity home with him.
When you tell me he ought to leave it all at the store or bank or
shop, you might as well tell a storm on the Atlantic to stay out there
and not touch the coast or ripple the harbor.
RESPECT SELF-SACRIFICE.
Remember, he is not overworking so much for himself as he is
overworking for you and the children. It is the effect of his success
or defeat on the homestead that causes him the agitation. The most of
men after forty-five years of age live not for themselves, but for
their families. They begin to ask themselves anxiously the question:
"How if I should give out, what would become of the folks at home?
Would my children ever get their education? Would my wife have to go
out into the world to earn bread for herself and our little ones? My
eyesight troubles me; how if my eyes should fail? My head gets dizzy;
how if I should drop under apoplexy?" The high pressure of business
life and mechanical life and agricultural life is home pressure.
Some time ago a large London firm decided that if any of their clerks
married on a salary less than L150--that is, $750 a year--he should be
discharged, the supposition being that the temptation might be too
great for misappropriation. The large majority of families in America
live by utmost dint of economy, and to be honest and yet meet one's
family expenses is the appalling question that turns the life of tens
of thousands of men into martyrdom. Let the wife of the overborne and
exhausted husband remember this, and do not nag him about that, and
say you might as well have no husband when the fact is he is dying by
inches that the home may be kept up.
BE LOVABLE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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