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Appeal to the Church
407
work here. Respect your hired help, treat them kindly, considerately,
but go no further. Let your deportment be such that there will be no
advances to familiarity from them. If you have words of kindness
and acts of courtesy to give, it is always safe to give them to your
wife. It will be a great blessing to her, and will bring happiness to
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her heart, to be reflected upon you again.
I have been shown also that the wife has let her sympathies and
interest and affection go out to other men, who may be members
of the family. She makes these her confidants, shows a preference
for their society, and relates to them her troubles and perhaps her
private family matters.
This is all wrong. Satan is at the bottom of it; and unless you are
alarmed and stop just where you are, he will lead you to ruin. You
cannot observe too great caution and encourage too much reserve in
this matter. If you have tender, loving words and kindly attentions to
bestow, let them be given to him whom you have promised before
God and angels to love, respect, and honor while you both shall
live. Oh, how many lives are made bitter by the breaking down of
the walls which enclose the privacies of every family and which are
calculated to preserve its purity and sanctity! A third person is taken
into the confidence of the wife, and her private family matters are
laid open before the special friend. This is the device of Satan to
estrange the hearts of the husband and wife. Oh, that this would
cease! what a world of trouble would be saved! Lock within your
own hearts the knowledge of each other’s faults. Tell your troubles
alone to God. He can give you right counsel and sure consolation,
which will be pure, having no bitterness in it.
I am acquainted with a number of women who have thought
their marriage a misfortune. They have read novels until their imag-
inations have become diseased, and they live in a world of their
own creating. They think themselves women of sensitive minds, of
superior, refined organizations, and imagine that their husbands are
not so refined, that they do not possess these superior qualities, and
therefore cannot appreciate their own supposed virtue and refined
organizations. Consequently these women think themselves great
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sufferers, martyrs. They have talked of this and thought upon it until
they are nearly maniacs upon this subject. They imagine their worth
superior to that of other mortals, and it is not agreeable to their fine