housetop than with _a brawling woman_ in a wide house."
And one day during the rainy season the water leaked through the roof
of the palace and began to drop in a pail or pan set there to catch
it. And at one side of him all day long the water went drop! drop!
drop! while on the other side a female companion quarrelling about
this, and quarrelling about that, the acrimonious and petulant words
falling on his ear in ceaseless pelting--drop! drop! drop! and he
seized his pen and wrote: "A continual dropping in a very rainy day
and _a contentious woman_ are alike." If Solomon had been as prayerful
at the beginning of his life as he was at the close, how much domestic
infelicity he would have avoided!

But prayer about this will amount to nothing unless you pray soon
enough. Wait until you are fascinated and the equilibrium of your soul
is disturbed by a magnetic and exquisite presence, and then you will
answer your own prayers, and you will mistake your own infatuation for
the voice of God.

AVOID SCOFFERS.

If you have this prayerful spirit you will surely avoid all female
scoffers at the Christian religion; and there are quite a number of
them in all communities. It must be told that, though the only
influence that keeps woman from being estimated and treated as a
slave--aye, as a brute and a beast of burden--is Christianity, since
where it is not dominant she is so treated, yet there are women who
will so far forget themselves and forget their God that they will go
and hear lecturers malign Christianity and scoff at the most sacred
things of the soul. A good woman, over-persuaded by her husband, may
go once to hear such a tirade against the Christian religion, not
fully knowing what she is going to hear; but she will not go twice.

A woman, not a Christian, but a respecter of religion, said to me: "I
was persuaded by my husband to go and hear an infidel lecturer once,
but going home, I said to him: 'My dear husband, I would not go again
though my declinature should result in our divorcement forever.'" And
the woman was right. If after all that Christ and Christianity have
done for a woman, she can go again and again to hear such assaults,
she is _an awful creature_, and you had better not come near such a
reeking lepress. She needs to be washed, and for three weeks to be
soaked in carbolic acid, and for a whole year, fumigated, before she
is fit for decent society. While it is not demanded that a woman be a
Chri