the patrimony bequeathed in perpetuity to the daughters. Happy is the
man who has a wife capable of getting a better meal than the hired
help, and whose smile is the light of his dwelling! Sometimes a girl
knows how to win, but cares not to keep. She gives place in her heart,
and a welcome in her home, to others more readily than to the one she
has given her plighted troth. This is criminal. A woman who does it is
a suicide. She is bent on ruin, and will find the pit ere long.

_Consider her wiles of speech_. Mystery here brings ruin to man as it
brought ruin to woman. Young ladies of culture and of refinement are
not ashamed to employ the language of the Parisian to lead astray the
companion of her life. God curse the language and the forms of speech
whose words drop with the very gall of death, which revel in elegant
dress as near the edge of indecency as is possible without treading
over the boundary! Her wiles of speech are bad, but her wiles of love
are the most perilous of all. Man needs love. He is fond of it. It is
his joy, come from whence it may. Love is the mind's light and heat. A
mind of the greatest stature, without love, is like a huge pyramid of
Egypt--chill and cheerless in all its dark halls and passages. A mind
with love, is as a king's palace lighted for a royal festival. Shame
that the sweetest of all the mind's attributes should be suborned to
sin. Think of it! each wile, rightly used, is a power given to woman
to make her man's helpmeet, and wrongly used will make her man's
destroyer.

Some one asked a minister for his conception of the personal
appearance of the devil. His reply was, "A false-hearted and
well-dressed gentleman, or a vain and fashionable woman." Woman was
Satan's first ally, though he worked in ambush, and approached man
in concealment. In the wisdom of his choice we discover the peril of
woman. It may be well briefly to review the public manner in which
Satan employs her talent for the ruin of man and in opposing the rule
of Christ.

1. Passing over her social power, and without referring to her wiles
of speech, of dress, of flattery, and of love, think of her in the
arena of politics, joining her forces to infidelity, and with the
disbelievers of the Bible, to obtain for woman a place for which she
is not fitted, and which will destroy her peace, injure and undermine
her influence in the home, and cause her to neglect wifehood and
motherhood, to turn from the interior world o