Very frequently women associated with great workers fail to appreciate the character of the work committed to them to do.  To the world a worker may seem to be a wonder.  To the one most intimately associated with him he is a very ordinary individual.  It is said a man is never a hero to his servant.  Is it not almost as true of his wife?  A living great man is ordinary in so many things in his daily life, that the wife forgets his greatness.  The wife of John Milton saw but a blind man in the bard, dwelling upon his immortal thought and evolving his world-renowned poem.  As the eagle stirs up her nest, compelling her broodlings to exert themselves, so God sometimes suffers a good man to link his fortunes with a woman who is ill-mated with him in every way.  In the light of the fact that Jesus found little or no appreciation in the society of Mary, and sought the home-joys elsewhere, woman ought to learn a lesson.  Is it not possible that you mistake your mission, and strike the rock of stumbling in your home, rather than avoid it by ignoring that which is grand and admirable in the life of him with whom you are associated?  Doubtless in a busy man, now full of joy, and now morose; now engrossed by a thought or scheme to such an extent that he forgets himself and his family, and now idle and listless as a boy,—­it may be hard, yet it is none the less a duty for woman to love him for what he is, and to see to it that he be ministered unto in his efforts.  O, how dear to the heart of a working man—­no matter whether he toil with brain or hand—­who feels that his wife understands him, defends and protects him, and keeps the home bright with love, though tempests may sweep across the path that leads him into the world!  There is a lesson here which belongs to men.  Mary’s lack of appreciation did not turn Jesus from his work.  It permitted his true character to appear to better advantage.  It tore down the scaffolding of Mariolatry, and permitted the God-man to stand forth in his grand proportions.  “Wist ye not I must be about my Father’s business?” said Jesus.  Many men make trouble at home an excuse for going to the bad.  It is not an excuse.  The design of home trouble may be to send a man to Jesus; to make the tendrils of love twine about the heavenly rather than the earthly.  It surely is not to induce a man to twine his affections about the devilish and earthly.  It is not manly thus to do.

Man moves in three circles.  The first is that of Self; the second that of Family; the third that of Country.  A man who properly performs duties that pertain to himself, we shall not call noble.  By neglecting family he becomes less than a man.  By performing them never so well he comes not to merit applause.  Distinctive nobleness begins with the third class.  It is when he rises above self and family, when he looks abroad on the family of mankind, that he takes the altitude which in a man is distinctively great; when he feels no longer the little necessities