The home is not built of brick and stone. It is a “temple not raised with hands.” A man may live in a palace, furnished with all that wealth can afford or luxury invent. He may have at his command books, servants, troops of friends, and yet there may be a void in his life which tells him that he is homeless.
And what is the home feeling—if we consider the partners of the wedded life for a moment, apart from their offspring? It is the blessed sense of safety that comes to him who feels that he is rooted in another’s affection, the sense of mutual protection, of mutual care and kindness, in sickness and in health, in good and in evil fortune, in life and close to the gates of death. Where the wife is, there is the home; and where the husband is, on land or sea. Oh, what a glad feeling it is to have one’s own hearth! As the hearth gives warmth to the house, so marriage supplies an undiminishing inner warmth to those who partake of its blessings in the right spirit.
Marriage is the fountain upon which the tree of humanity depends for its life. If the fountain be pure, the tree will flourish and bear wholesome fruit. If the fountain be poisoned the tree must perish.
The god of Love is a jealous god. This does not mean that love should be wholly concentrated upon one person, but rather that the god of Love is jealous of anything in the heart that is not akin to love—jealous of hate, jealous of meanness, jealous of low and sordid aims.
The love of husband and wife is an epitome of every other kind of love. There is included in it something of the same feeling that brothers and sisters entertain for each other. There is a maternal element in the wife’s feeling for the husband, and something of the fatherly spirit in the attitude of the husband toward the wife. And there is besides something more which is inexplicable and ineffable.