endurance.  However many good qualities of mind and heart and character any husband or wife may have, no human being is perfect, and most of us are very far from being perfect.  When therefore, we are closely and indissolubly joined to another life and another will, it is no wonder that sometimes the ill-fitting yoke eats into a lifelong sore.  We have all many defects in our manners, in our habits, and in our constitutional ways of thinking and speaking and acting,—­defects that tempt those who live nearest us to fall into annoyances with us that sometimes deepen into dislike, and even positive disgust, till it has been seen, in some extreme cases, that home-life has become a very prison-house, in which the impatient prisoner chafes and jibs and strikes out as he does nowhere else.  Now, when any unhappy man or woman wakens up to discover how different life is now to be from what it once promised to become, let them know that all their past blindness, and precipitancy, and all the painful results of all that, may yet be made to work together for good.  In your patience with one another, says our Lord, you will make a conquest of your adverse lot, and of your souls to the bargain.  Say to yourselves, therefore, that perfection, faultlessness, and absolute satisfaction are not to be found in this world.  And say also that since you have not brought perfection to your side of the house any more than your partner has to his side, you are not so foolish as to expect perfection in return for such imperfection.  You have your own share of what causes fireside silence, aversion, disappointment, and dislike; and, with God’s help, say that you will patiently submit to what may not now be mended.  And then, the sterner the battle the nobler will the victory be; and the lonelier the fight, the more honour to him who flinches not from it.  In your patience possess ye your souls.

What a beautiful, instructive, and even impressive sight it is to see a nurse patiently cherishing her children!  How she has her eye and her heart at all their times upon them, till she never has any need to lay her hand upon them!  Passion has no place in her little household, because patience fills all its own place and the place of passion too.  What a genius she displays in her talks to her children!  How she cheats their little hours of temptation, and tides them over the rough places that her eye sees lying like sunken rocks before her little ship!  How skilfully she stills and heals their impulsive little passions by her sudden and absorbing surprise at some miracle in a picture-book, or some astonishing sight under her window!  She has a thousand occupations also for her children, and each of them with a touch of enterprise and adventure and benevolence in it.  She is so full of patience herself, that the little gusts of passion are soon over in her presence, and the sunshine is soon back brighter than ever in her little paradise.  And, over and above her children