There is in every true woman a spark of divinity, which glows in her heart, and blazes into a most luminous light when a husband’s love and respect and sympathy and appreciation and encouragement fan that spark into activity.  But woe to the home where cruel hands quench that flame.  The sun is the heater and illuminator of our whole solar system.  The vast supplies which it sends forth daily must be compensated, or else it would soon expend itself, and our world would go to ruin.  Nature, therefore, hurls millions of meteors every second into the sun’s fiery furnace to keep up the supply of heat and light.  The wife is the sun of the household.  Her womanly attributes give the light and warmth and happiness of the home to all who cluster around her.  But a wife’s love and self-sacrifice for her home are not infinite.  They soon exhaust themselves, where love is unreturned, where a husband is a tyrant, where self-sacrifice is unappreciated, where faithful and prudent industry is accepted as a labor of duty, and not as a labor of love, where she is simply regarded as his housekeeper, and not as his devoted helpmate, where his presence alone is sufficient to cast gloom and fear over the entire household.  Woman was made to bless mankind, but also to be blessed in return; to make society better for forming a part thereof, but also to receive some recognition for her work.

Endurance is woman’s prerogative.  Suffering is her heirloom.  Disasters, which would crush the spirit of man, often turn her heart to steel, and she performs deeds grand and heroic.  Disheartened by continuous neglect, she will make heroic efforts to throw her influence all the more affectionately over her home.  Wounded deeper and ever deeper, she will toil on, hiding from the world the pangs of wounded affection, “as the wounded dove will clasp its wings to its side and cover and conceal the arrow that is preying on its vitals.”  But the shafts of continuous neglect will pierce her heart at last—­a husband’s continuous neglect extinguish, at last, the sacred flame upon the domestic hearth.  She, too, finds home irksome.  She, too, learns to find more pleasure abroad than in her home.  She, too, thinks light of liberties and indiscretions.  The grown children learn to emulate their parents’ example, and seek their pleasures also abroad.  The little children are left to servants to finish the corruption begun by parents.  And so the home, the very spot designed by God to become the chief school of human virtue, the seminary of social affections, the keystone of the whole fabric of society, the germ-cell of civilization, becomes a hotbed of corruption, and almost as often on account of a husband’s neglect and sins, as on account of a wife’s ignorance or frailties or failings.  Our stock of advice to wives and mothers seems inexhaustible.  Almost every one of the stronger sex has his fling at woman, and his remedy to offer, which, if immediately followed, will at once eradicate unhappiness in marriage, decrease the number of divorces, and lessen vice and crime in society.