e best critic that ministers can have is one who has a right
to criticize and to "truth it in love." Who has a better right to
reprove, exhort and correct with all long suffering than the woman who
has given us her heart and herself? There are a hundred matters in the
course of a year in which a sensible woman's instincts are wiser than
those of the average man. There is many a minister who would have been
spared the worst blunders of his life, if he had only consulted and
obeyed the instinctive judgment of a loving and sensible wife. If we
husbands hold the reins, it is the province of a wise and devoted wife
to tell us where to drive.

It is very probable that my readers have suspected that this portraiture
of a model wife for a minister was drawn from actual life; and they are
right in their conjectures. In the discourse delivered to my flock on
the twenty-fifth anniversary of my pastorate was the following passage,
to whose truth the added years have only added confirmation, "There is
still another sweet mercy which has been vouchsafed to me in the true
heart that has never faltered and the gentle footstep that has never
wearied in the pathway of life for two and thirty years. From how many
mistakes and hasty indiscretions her quick sagacity has kept me, you can
never know. If you have any tribute of thanks for any good which I have
done you, do not offer it to me; go carry it down to yonder home, of
which she has been the light and the joy, and _lay it at her unselfish
feet."_ On that occasion (for the _only_ time) I heard a murmur of
applause run through my congregation.

About the time of our marriage, I received a call from the Shawmut
Congregational Church of Boston, and soon afterwards overtures from a
Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and from the First Presbyterian
Church of Chicago. All these attractive offers I declined, but within a
few months I accepted a call from the Market Street Dutch Reformed
Church of New York--a far more difficult field of labor. My ministry in
Trenton was one of unbroken happiness, and the Church were profusely
kind; but at the end of nearly four years I felt that my work there was
done. The young church had built a beautiful house of worship without a
dime of debt, and it was filled by a prosperous congregation. I was
ready for a wider field of labor.

The Market Street Dutch Reformed Church, to which I was called, was down
town, within ten minutes' walk of the City Hall, a