drank of it, and so has every man who has
ever tasted the sacramental wine of woman's true affection. The seamy
side of life has been laid bare to me. Its sorrows and its anguishes
have I often witnessed, but into that pool of Bethesida of the world's
anguish, with healing do I see ever come an angel, a pitying woman.
The influence of wife and mother is ever near me; their faces are the
most lovely; their hearts the most tender of all in this world--my
mother and my wife. And for their sake, and for the sake of all the
mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, whom I daily meet doing good, I
long and I earnestly yearn for the eloquence and grace to half express
the thoughts that rise within me of what the world owes woman.

To me every good woman is the fair fulfillment of dreamed delight. She
is the first at the cross and the last at the grave. All that is
highest and best in the world is nurtured and fed by the milk of her
nobility. The Christ of all greatness and hope was born of a woman.
The noble women of the world! O, would that the days of chivalry were
not past, that I might unsheath a lance in their name, for their glory!
But in our more prosaic days, what can I do but let the will suffice
for the deed, and say to the woman, "God bless you." I propose to let
her speak for herself today. I propose to accept her invitation to
accompany her through the various spheres of her domestic life, and see
whether she alone is responsible for that vice and crime and misfortune
which moralists and superintendents of penal and charity institutes
trace back to neglects at home; whether it is always the wife and
mother that is responsible for unhappiness in marriage and for the
increase of divorces; whether the husbands and fathers are always the
saints and martyrs, or whether they are not very, very often the root
of the whole evil themselves.

We retrace our steps and begin with our observations of the husband and
father a few months prior to that solemn day, on which he plighted his
vows of protection and faithfulness, on which he took into his care and
trust a woman's life and happiness, on which he sacredly promised, in
the name of God, and in the presence of witnesses, to love her, to
honor and cherish her, to provide for her, to be faithful to her in all
his obligations as husband, in youth and in old age, in sunshine and in
darkness, in prosperity and in adversity. We make first his
acquaintance in the happy d