ey must ask no questions. The wife has had
enough annoyances in the nursery, and parlor, and kitchen to fill her
nerves with nettles and spikes. As you have provided the money for
food and wardrobe, you feel you have done all required of you. Toward
the good cheer, and the intelligent improvement, and the moral
entertainment of that home, which at the longest can last but a few
years, you are doing nothing. You seem to have no realization of the
fact that soon these children will be grown up or in their sepulchres,
and will be far removed from your influence, and that the wife will
soon end her earthly mission, and that house will be occupied by
others, and you yourself will be gone.

Gentlemen, fulfill your contracts. Christian marriage is an affectional
bargain. In heathen lands a man wins his wife by achievements. In some
countries wives are bought by the payment of so many dollars, as so many
cattle or sheep. In one country the man gets on a horse and rides down
where a group of women are standing, and seizes one of them by the hair,
and lifts her, struggling and resisting, on his horse, and if her
brothers and friends do not overtake her before she gets to the jungle,
she is his lawful wife. In another land the masculine candidate for
marriage is beaten by the club of the one whom he would make his bride.
If he cries out under the pounding, he is rejected. If he receives the
blows uncomplainingly, she is his by right. Endurance, and bravery, and
skill decide the marriage in barbarous lands, but Christian marriage is
a voluntary bargain, in which you promise protection, support,
companionship and love.

THE TERMS OF THE CONTRACT.

Business men have in their fire-proof safes a file of papers
containing their contracts, and sometimes they take them out and read
them over to see what the party of the first part and the party of the
second part really bound themselves to do. Different ministers of
religion have their own peculiar forms of marriage ceremony; but if
you have forgotten what you promised at the altar of wedlock, you had
better buy or borrow an Episcopal Church-Service, which contains the
substance of all intelligent marriage ceremonies, when it says: "I
take thee to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day
forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance, and thereto I pledg