Without justice, also, there
can be neither love, confidence, nor respect, on which all true domestic
rule is founded.

Erasmus speaks of Sir Thomas More's home as "a school and exercise of
the Christian religion." "No wrangling, no angry word was heard in it;
no one was idle; every one did his duty with alacrity, and not without
a temperate cheerfulness." Sir Thomas won all hearts to obedience by his
gentleness. He was a man clothed in household goodness; and he ruled so
gently and wisely, that his home was pervaded by an atmosphere of love
and duty. He himself spoke of the hourly interchange of the smaller acts
of kindness with the several members of his family, as having a claim
upon his time as strong as those other public occupations of his life
which seemed to others so much more serious and important.

But the man whose affections are quickened by home-life, does not
confine his sympathies within that comparatively narrow sphere. His
love enlarges in the family, and through the family it expands into the
world. "Love," says Emerson, "is a fire that, kindling its first embers
in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out
of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams
upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and
so lights up the whole world and nature with its generous flames."

It is by the regimen of domestic affection that the heart of man is best
composed and regulated. The home is the woman's kingdom, her state,
her world--where she governs by affection, by kindness, by the power of
gentleness. There is nothing which so settles the turbulence of a man's
nature as his union in life with a highminded woman. There he finds
rest, contentment, and happiness--rest of brain and peace of spirit.
He will also often find in her his best counsellor, for her instinctive
tact will usually lead him right when his own unaided reason might be
apt to go wrong. The true wife is a staff to lean upon in times of trial
and difficulty; and she is never wanting in sympathy and solace when
distress occurs or fortune frowns. In the time of youth, she is a
comfort and an ornament of man's life; and she remains a faithful
helpmate in maturer years, when life has ceased to be an anticipation,
and we live in its realities.

What a happy man must Edmund Burke have been, when he could say of his
home, "Every care vanishes the moment I enter under my own roof!" A