A Wife

1 Whoso findeth a wife finduth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord.” — xviii. 22 ‘A prudent wife is from the Lord.” — xix. 14.

‘The contentions of a wife are a continual dropping.” “It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman.” — xix. 13; xxi. 19.

|HESE three portions, scattered promiscuously over several chapters, contain three distinct but connected propositions. The first intimates that the marriage relation as the appointment of God, and without particular reference to the character of the persons, is good for man. The second, that when a man, upon entering that relation, obtains a wife who is in her individual character a prudent woman, he has obtained a blessing above all price. The third, that when the object chosen to occupy a relation so tender and close is personally unworthy, the calamity to the man is great in proportion to the preciousness of the divine institute which has in this case been perverted. The three announcements may be more briefly expressed thus:

1. A wife — the conjugal relation as such — is a good gift of God.

2. When the wife is a good woman, there is a double blessing, in the nature of the relation, and in the character of the person fulfilling it. 3. When the woman’s own character is evil, her position as a wife indefinitely augments her power for mischief. Having thus once for all set forth the subjects in their order and relations, I shall not rigidly adhere to the logical arrangement, but permit the illustration in some measure to revert to the miscellaneous form which characterizes the original text.

Had the first text made the boon depend on the personal goodness of the wife, it would have been more easily understood; but the range is wider, and the meaning deeper, as it is. The word declares boldly, and without qualification, that a wife is a gift from God, and good for man. The text which intimates that a prudent wife is from the Lord tells a truth, but it is one of the most obvious of truths; the text which intimates that a wife is a favour from the Lord, without expressly stipulating for her personal character, goes higher up in the history of providence, and deeper into the wisdom of God. His Maker in the beginning said, “It is not good for man to be alone;” and after all the ill that came to him through that weaker vessel, the same word remains as true as ever. Although Satan tempted Eve, woman as she came from God’s hand, is the meetest help for man. The catastrophe did not take the Omniscient by surprise; the event did not change his view.

“From the beginning God made man male and female.” He knows what is in man whom he made. Of design he made neither complete. He left a want in each, that the two might coalesce into one — one flesh and one spirit. Woman, who becomes the filling up of the vacuum in man, balancing his defects, absorbing the excesses of his cares, and reduplicating his joys, — woman, by her constitution and her place, is a good thing, and should be devoutly sought as well as devoutly acknowledged, a favour from the Lord.

The Creator of man gives peculiar honour to this ordinance. He has framed the world in accordance with it. The designed imperfectness of an individual runs through all life, vegetable as well as animal; and the same type meets us on every hand, even in inanimate nature. Duality is necessary to completeness. This feature runs down from units to fractions, — from persons to the subordinate members of which they consist. You meet it in the hands, eyes, ears, of your own body. The principle that two are better than one lies very deep, and spreads very widely in the works of God. Having set it thus in nature, he solemnly appoints it in his word, and guards it in his providence. When he made man in his own image, he gave great prominence to this principle by making him at first alone, and thereafter finishing the incompleted work. He defended the integrity of the institution in thunder from Sinai, and engraved it in the tables of stone. He chose it as the body in which his own spiritual relation to ransomed Israel might become, as it were, visible: “Thy Maker is thy husband.” And when Christ came to make all things new, he expressly took the marriage union under his own protection; certified it as an original appointment of God for man; purged it of the corruptions wherewith Jewish tradition had overlaid it; and gave it over to his church in such terms, that his apostles ever after delighted to call himself the Bridegroom, and his people the bride prepared for his coming.

This union is greatly honoured by God, and much dishonoured by man. We should recognise this as one great cause of his controversy with us, when we lament the judgments that fall on the nation and the deadness that lies on the church. In treating Tightly what he counts so grave, in defiling that which he desires to keep holy as a fitting emblem of Christ’s union to the saved, the nation is provoking the Most High to jealousy, and suffering retribution, in the uneasy motion or abrupt rending of the various joints which bind society together. The extent to which this holy institution is profaned and disregarded, both in high places and low, is one of the abominations done in the land, for which those who seek a revival should sigh and cry.

Here is a presumptuous abuse which provokes the Lord to anger, and torments the community by infusing rottenness into its bones: — Among certain classes marriage is deliberately contemplated beforehand, and in the fulness of an evil time deliberately resorted to, as a cure to save a libertine in the last resort. In some quarters it seems to be scarcely regretted that a youth with large prospects should run riot in early manhood, seeing he has marriage to fall back upon when he is wearied with his own ways. The slight and measured reprobation of this course, not to speak of the positive approval, is a daring defiance of the Holy One. Vengeance is exacted by the awful machinery of his providential laws. The shallow trick is not successful. Man cannot cheat the Omniscient. The barbs of punishment are bedded in the crime, and infallibly run through the criminal When a young man, deceived it may be, and encouraged by the opinion of those who surround him, throws the reins on the neck of his passion, he flatters himself that he has a good heart, — that at any moment, ere matters go too far, he has it in his power to marry, reform, and enjoy the staid, sober pleasures of wedded life. He flatters himself, indeed! He is laying a lying unction to his soul. Licentiousness takes out of a human heart the softness necessary to complete conjugal union. Although the wounds which a libertine’s soul has ignobly ^otteu in the house of the strange woman may be healed, through mercy, to the saving of the soul’s life, their effects never can be removed until the body crumble into dust. There is a hardness which for ever prevents the peculiar fusion of nature implied in two becoming one flesh. Consciousness of antecedent impureness, and mutual suspicion thereby generated, constitute an effectual bar to the full fruition of the good ordinance of God. They who have dared the knowledge of evil, are inexorably driven from the garden, and must maintain an uneasy conflict against wild beasts without and thistles within, all their days. You cannot enjoy the pleasures of sin, and when these have failed, turn round and take the pleasures which our Father in heaven has provided for the pure. A treaty of alliance you may have, like those which potentates frame to regulate the intercourse of nations; or a partnership, like that which constitutes a mercantile firm; but marriage, as God appointed it at creation, and Christ described it, — marriage you cannot have, if you profanely grasp it as a convenience to stop your own excesses and decently cover the disgrace which they have entailed. No; the real coalescence of two into one, which doubles the joys and divides the sorrows of life, is an inner Eden, from which the weary debauchee is debarred for ever, as if by an angel with a flaming sword.

“It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman.” Though the bond in itself be a blessing, an unequal yoke only galls the wearers. Every one has known some pair chained together by human laws, where the hearts’ union has either never existed or been rent asunder. Two ships at sea are bound to each other by strong short chains. As long as the sea remains perfectly calm, all may be well with both; though they do each other no good, they may not inflict much evil. But the sea never rests long, and seldom rests at all. Woe to these two ships when the waves begin to roll! There are two conditions in which they might be safe. If they were either brought more closely together, or more widely separated, it might yet be well with them. If they were from stem to stern rivetted into one, or if the chain were broken, and the two left to follow independently their several courses, there would be no further cause of anxiety on their account. If they are so united that they shall move as one body, they are safe; if they move far apart they are safe. The worst possible position is to be chained together, and yet have separate and independent motion in the waves. They will rasp each other’s sides off, and tear open each other’s heart, and go down together.

See in this glass the different kinds of conjugal union which obtain in actual life, and the corresponding consequences. Let it be a real marriage, — let the two be no longer twain, but one flesh; and then, though the united pair may experience many ups and downs in the troubled sea of life, they will rise and fall together. Common troubles will never make them tear each other. The two in one will present a broader surface to the sea, and stand more steady when it rages. But when the two are not one — when the mysterious cement has broken, or never taken band — when they obey separate impulses and point in different directions, while yet they are tied together by a legal contract, their condition is dreadful. How many wretched pairs, separate and yet bound, are tossing on the troubled sea of time! It is now a racking check when the binding chain is suddenly tightened, and now a rasping of their sides when they come together. Such are the alternations of married life where hearts are divorced and legal bonds still hold fast. Now and then a faint shriek is heard through the whistling winds; and when the spectators look in that direction, one of the labouring vessels has disappeared. “To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.” This awful law is ever at hand to defend or avenge God’s primeval institute. As becomes a great King, the rewards are great on the one side, the sanctions heavy on the other.

“The contentions of a wife are a continual dropping.” Contentions are not pleasant in any circumstances, but the closeness of the parties, whether in moral relation or physical position, indefinitely augments the discomfort. A man may pass through a sharp contention in the hall of legislation or the mart of commerce, and an hour afterwards mingle with an unburdened heart in the sports of his children. The conflicts which are waged abroad may be left behind you when you go home, if love unmixed be waiting there to receive you. But a man soon becomes distracted if he is tossed like a shuttlecock from the wearing cares of business to the biting strifes of home, and from the biting strifes of home back to the wearing cares of business. A quarrel between a man and his wife is, as to the torment which it inflicts, the nearest thing to a quarrel between the man and his own conscience. Next after himself, she lies closest to him, and the pain of a disagreement is proportioned accordingly. Specifically, this contention is a continual dropping. Let a wife note well that the resulting mischief does not depend on the degree of furiousness which may characterize the conflict. It depends on length rather than loudness. A perennial drop may do more to drive a man to extremities than a sudden flood. A little for ever is more terrible to the imagination than a great outpouring at once.

“A continual dropping” is said to have been one of the engines which the wit of man contrived when it was put upon the stretch for the means of torturing his fellows. The victim was so placed that a drop of water continued to fall at regular intervals on his naked head. With length of time, and no hope of relief, the agony becomes excruciating, and either the patient’s reason or his life gives way. Let a wife, or a husband, beware. Don’t make home miserable by gloomy looks and taunting discontented words. Don’t deceive yourself with the plea that your complaints were never immoderate: if your moderate complaints never cease, they will eat through a man’s life at last. Although no such disturbance should ever occur as would demand the presence of the police, or give you among your neighbours the character of a scold, the patience of a husband may be utterly worn out. Though words of discontent should never rise into the violence of a passion — although they should never be heavier than drops of water — yet, if they continue drop, drop, dropping, so that he sees no prospect of an end, his heart will either be hardened into indifference or broken into despair. Love cannot be sustained by dislike, administered in moderate quantities; if it do not get positive, manifest, gleaming love to live upon, it wih die.

It is the testimony of all who have in person probed the sores of society, that unfeeling, spendthrift husbands, and sullen, slovenly wives, are to a large extent correlatives. In a very great number of cases, the two are found together in the same dwelling. In all these, it is further manifest that the two act reciprocally on each other as cause and effect, — a drunken husband making a sullen wife, and a sullen wife making a drunken husband. HCAY often the circulating train of connected evils is set in motion at first by the fault of the husband, and how often by the fault of the wife, cannot be precisely ascertained. One may, however, infer that the predominance of the evil lies on the side where there is predominance of power. But making all due allowance on this side,* it remains sure and obvious, that the contentions of a woman, falling like water-drops on her husband’s head, cause the drunkenness in many cases, and aggravate it in all. In illustration of another text, I have distinctly intimated, that if we had a greater number of sober husbands we would have a greater number of smiling wives: here, desiring to divide the word as one who must give an account, I say, on the other hand, if there were a greater number of smiling wives, there would be a greater number of sober husbands.

“Only in the Lord” (1 Cor. vii. 39), is the apostle’s rule on this subject. In view of all the difficulties, it is sufficient, and it alone.

If these suggestions have been cast mainly in a negative rather than a positive form — if, like the Decalogue itself, their prevalent aspect be, “Thou shalt not” — there is a cause. Laws are made for the rebellious. The obedient find a great reward in the act of keeping the commandment, and the reproof which is aimed at presumptuous transgressors passes harmlessly over them. I would fain give the encouragement and the warning too; but, where the blessing and the curse lie so near each other, it is difficult to divide them aright. This divinely-appointed union is, in human life, like the busy bee returning laden home. The sweetest honey and the sharpest sting lie in it both; and they lie not far apart. But for the honey it has been created, not for the sting: for the honey it lives and labours, not for the sting. The sting is there only to make the honey secure. That which is of the highest value is most sternly guarded. The armed sentinel keeps watch beside the jewelled crown. Every day, and all the day, the honey is gathered and stored and enjoyed: the sting lies idle in its sheath, and, except to ward off or punish violence, is never used at all.

Those who in marriage lawfully seek and enjoy the sweets wherewith God has charged it, complain not of the sting that never touches them. For thieves and robbers it has been planted there, and the honest have no desire to pluck it out.