Our foremothers came to their wedding day supplied with chests filled with plain durable linen, of their own weaving and fashioning, bed-linen and quilts and spreads in substantial profusion; but with little in the line of showy outside dress; and their whole after lives were but the expression of the wisdom and good judgment of their beginning.
“The crying need of many of us to-day, is not for more, but less. We have too much, so that our lives are robbed of all simplicity. We are choked by our possessions, as the Roman maiden by the golden bracelets for which she betrayed the city.
“Our artificialities make a veil between our souls and God. We have not mastered them, but they have mastered us.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE MARITAL RELATIONS.
The Subject Approached With Reluctance.—The Marital State Should be the Most Sacred of Sanctuaries.—Wrongly Interpreted it is the Abode of Darkness and Sin.—Its Influence for Good or Evil upon Character.—Responsibility of Mothers for the Unhappy Lives of Their Daughters.—Commercial Marriages.—Marriage as it Should be.—The Husband’s Danger from “Aggressiveness.”—The Wife Should not Provoke the Wrongs She Suffers.—Marital Modesty.—Parenthood the Justification of the Marital Act.—Reproduction the Primal Purpose.—Harmony of Purpose and Life.—Love’s Highest Plane.—The Value of Continence.—The Right and Wrong of Marriage.—The Relation During Gestation.—Effects of Relation During Gestation Illustrated.—The Wrongdoings of Good Men.—The Fruits of Ignorance.—The Better Day Coming.
We approach this chapter with a degree of reluctance, because of the varying opinions entertained by many good people, and because of the false notions which have crept into the conception of its responsibilities, its duties, its privileges, its rights, and its wrongs.
When the marital state is entered in the spirit of Him who ordained it, no sanctuary is more sacred; when entered in the misconception of many men and women of modern times, no relation is more of the abode of darkness and sin.