“Let a man love his wife even as himself,” and “be not bitter against her.” Marcus Aurelius said, that “a wise man ought often to admonish his wife, to reprove her seldom, but never to lay his hands on her.” The marital love is infinitely removed from all possibility of such rudeness; it is a thing pure as light, sacred as a temple, lasting as the world.
There is nothing can please a man without love; and if a man be weary of the wise discourses of the Apostles, and of the innocency of an even and private fortune, or hates peace or a fruitful year, he has reaped thorns and thistles from the choicest flowers of paradise, “for nothing can sweeten felicity itself, but love;” but when a man dwells in love, then the breasts of his wife are pleasant as the droppings upon the hill of Hermon, her eyes are fair as the light of heaven, she is a fountain sealed, and he can quench his thirst, and ease his cares, and lay his sorrow down in her lap, and can retire home to his sanctuary and refectory, and his gardens of sweetness and chaste refreshment.
CHAPTER IV.
PRECAUTIONARY HINTS.
He that proposes to marry, and wishes to enjoy happiness in that state, should choose a wife descended from honest parents, she being chaste, well bred, and of good manners. For if a woman has good qualities, she has portion enough. That of Alcmena, in Plautus, is much to the purpose, where he brings in a young woman speaking thus:—
“I take not that to be my dowry, which
The vulgar sort do wealth and honour call:
That all my wishes terminate in this,—
I’ll obey my husband, and be chaste withal:
To have God’s fear, and beauty, in my mind,
To do those good who are virtuously inclined.”