Self-Exaltation
119
and fret and burden her with your many suggestions and reflections
upon her management.
You have many good and generous traits of character. You are a
courteous, affable man, in general, to those outside your own family.
Perhaps this is attributable, in some measure, to the fact that you dare
not exhibit your natural disposition to any except those whom you
consider greatly your inferiors. If your superiority is not sufficiently
recognized in society, you are determined that it shall be at home,
where you think that none will presume to dispute its claims.
You should go diligently about effecting a change in your self. If
you are willing to sacrifice your selfishness, your exacting disposition,
your pet notions and ideas, you can have a peaceful, happy home upon
which angels will delight to look. Is it sweeter to have your will than
to see a proper freedom of action and spirit in your household? Your
home is not always just what it should be, but you are the principal
cause of its discord. If you stand as a representative of Christ upon
the earth, do not, I beseech you, misrepresent your blessed Redeemer,
who was meek and kind, gentle and forgiving.
It is a fact well worth your consideration that it is a difficult thing
for people who have sound minds and ideas of their own, to work
precisely in the groove that another may lay out for them. Therefore
you have no moral right to embarrass your wife and family with your
whims and petulant notions concerning their employment. It will be
hard for you to at once change your mode of operation, but make a
firm determination that you will not enter your kitchen unless it be
to encourage the efforts and praise the management of those who are
laboring there. Let commendation take the place of censure.
[130]
Cultivate traits of character the opposite of those which are here
reproved. Seek to develop goodness, patience, love, and all the graces
which will have a transforming influence in your home and will
brighten the lives of your family and your friends. Confess that you
have done wrong, and then turn squarely about and strive to be just
and right. Do not endeavor to make your wife a slave to your will,
but by kindness and an unselfish desire to promote her comfort and
happiness draw her into close sympathy with yourself. Give her an
opportunity to exercise her faculties, and do not try to warp her mind
and mold her judgment till she loses her mental identity.