our weakness. You complain of our inferiority, but none of your behaviour bids us rise. Sensibility has given us a thousand feelings, which nature has kindly denied you. Always under restraints, we have little liberty of choice. Providence seems to have been more attentive to enable us to confer happiness than to enjoy it. Every condition has for us fresh mortifications; every relation, new sorrows. We enter social bonds; it is a system of perpetual sacrifice. We cannot give life to others without hazarding our own. We have sufferings which you do not share, cannot share. If spared, years and decays invade our charms, and much of the ardour produced by attraction departs with it. We may die. The grave covers us, and we are soon forgotten; soon are the days of your mourning ended, soon is our loss repaired: dismissed even from your speech, our name is to be heard no more: a successor may dislike it. Our children after having a a mother by nature, may fall under the controul of a mother by affinity, and be mortified

by distinctions made between them and her own offspring. Though the duties which we have discharged invariably, be the most important and necessary, they do not shine: they are too common to strike: they procure no celebrity the wife, the mother fills no historic page. Our privations, our confinements, our wearisome days, our interrupted, our sleepless nights, the hours we have hung in anxious watching over your sick and dying offspring.-But we forbear.”

:

On the other hand let the wife be on her guard against allowing the infirmities of the body to engender infirmity of mind, and still more against justifying herself in irritation of temper upon the plea of constitutional disease. Let her guard herself against a morbid sensibility that takes umbrage at slights which are never intended. Let her consider

that whatever cares of sustenance, whatever labour, whether of mind or body, to provide for their worldly necessities the family requires, falls upon her husband, who must often have his thoughts distracted and filled

with anxieties, which, however she may share his confidence, she is unable to appreciate; especially should his worldly calling or office be of such a nature as to require great exertion of mind. Let her, as the church loves to receive communication from the Lord, rejoice also when she is made the confidant of her husband's difficulties; but let her not attempt to pry into, and meddle with more than he pleases, and judges right to declare.

Their prayers should have a special reference to these ordinances; that the wife may be enabled to "submit", and the husband to "love;" the children enabled to "honor," the parents not to "provoke" them; the servants enabled to be "faithful," and the masters to be "just." And let them nothing doubt that in acknowledging God in these His ordinances of domestic life, they will be abundantly heard and answered. If their dispositions are different, let that which predominates in one supply the deficiency of the other for the general good of the family over which God has placed them. Should one be capricious, let the stern and settled unbending tenor of

the other prevent the evil which would otherwise accrue: if one be harsh, let the softness of the other counteract it: if one be irritable, let the quiet of the other neutralize it. Let each remember too, and especially the wife, that the husband must or ought to be for some hours alone every day: above all the wives of ministers, for which good directions are to be found in the work of George Herbert.

In the parallel which is set forth in Scripture between Christ and His church, and between husbands and wives, there is one essential distinction which must not be lost sight of, because if it be, the parallel will prove rather deceptious than instructive. It is that Christ is alone pure and spotless; the church only perfect in Him, while in herself she is all vile and loathsome; but that husbands and wives are equally sinners in God's sight, and equally offenders one against the other. In God's dealings with men in all their various relationships, He looks upon the head as responsible for all the evil which He finds in the body. Thus nations at large are ad

dressed in the name of the king; and churches are rebuked, warned, and encouraged in the name of their angel or bishop. The most profligate of libertines have remarked that it is extremely rare to find an instance, even in foreign courts, of the infidelity of a wife to her husband, except where he had given the first provocation. It cannot have escaped notice that, although the variety of interruptions to which the continued happiness of wedded life is liable, must be infinite, yet the word of God points out but two remedies, namely, obedience and submission on the part of the wife, and love on the part of the husband. Casual observers of mankind have perceived the wonderful constancy of affection in women, under persevering ill-treatment from men on whom their affections are fixed; examples of which are to be found even in the lowest and most abandoned classes. Thus God indicates in his word that which is an ordained constitution of the female mind; that it is not in struggling, but in submitting, even to harshness and injustice, that the path of happiness is to be sought.