GOOD WIVES by E. S. Porter

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, May 13, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 20

GOOD WIVES.

By E. S. Porter

Good wives are great treasures. They are more than silver or gold. Their love is better than money. If it be pure, self-denying, and yet considerate, it will be to their husbands a constant encouragement. It will invest them with an atmosphere in which every element of manly character may grow toward the full. Notwithstanding the reports of domestic infelicities which appear almost daily, still we are sure that the good wives are vastly in the majority, and that they give honor, and dignity, and grace, to marriage as of old.

In the lighter and semi-indecent literature of nearly every age, marriage has been the inexhaustible theme of ridicule. Dramatists and satirists like to take undue license with things respectable and even sacred. They have laid on woman, as such, unjust and heavy burdens of vicious humor or of defiling wit. And yet her queenly ascendancy remains in ever-unfolding splendor. So to-day, in all Christian lands, good wives have and readily hold a power the equal of which in its extent and beneficence does not belong to any sceptered potentate.

For good wives and mothers rule in the empire of the affections. They shape character, give tone to manners, make virtue attractive, commend piety, and fill their homes with sunshine. They are the dispensers of gladness; their tender hands smooth the raven down of care, until it is changed into the quiescence of hope. Their prayers are as benedictions, and the good they do in their quiet ways is seen in the state and in the church. They deserve honor, and receive it. No matter what the novels or the newspapers may do to undermine respect for marriage, it remains, after all, the sole representative of paradise, and is the type of the relation between Christ and his church. Let it be held sacred.—E. S. Porter, D. D., in Christian Weekly.