God knew Eve, for he built her. He knew her heart, her mind, her
aspiration. A parent knows something of the child; and well it is for
both parent and child when this knowledge is perfect, and when the
relation subsisting between parents and children is such that home is
a place of consultation. A home without secrets, without closed doors,
and locked drawers and sugar-boxes,--a home where thought is free, and
mind is untrammelled, is the very gate of heaven.

There are homes where the children are excluded from counsel, from
love, from plan, from association. Those children live in a world
apart from their parents, and it will not be strange if they are swept
out by the waves of evil to ruin.

There are homes where the father shuts himself away from the wife and
children. To the children he is harsh, unsympathetic, and morose. Ah!
there is sorrow in that house. The mother--God bless her!--has a hard
time. She has to keep in with the father, and she will keep in with
the children. In that bundle of life the tendrils of her nature are
bound up. She fights a prolonged battle in regard to expenditure and
education. Happiness only comes when the household is one, and the
relations between father and children are perfect, as God designed
them to be.

Again, God gives his sanction not only to the truth that man's wants
can only be met by the gift of woman,--a fact which every man has
felt, and which causes every man to feel that somewhere on earth his
wife is living, who will recognize and welcome him to the bliss of
love and to the joy of companionship,--but this additional truth is
taught: Man has a right to marry. Love is no disgrace. It is the
pretence of it, for base purposes, which is disgraceful. The nuptial