Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/376

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WIFELY HELP.


When Columbus braved the perils of unknown seas to add America to the world, it was the white hand of a woman that fitted him for his venturesome voyage of discovery. So woman equips man every day for the voyage of life. Woman as man's helper rises to her "peculiar and best altitude." He represents the intellect, she the mind-governing heart. Power appertains to him, but influence, more subtle and penetrating than power—another name for power in its most delicate and all-pervading form—belongs to her.

Sheridan said "it is by woman that nature writes upon the heart of man," and what hand can trace such glorious inscriptions upon that book, when it is sacredly hers, as a wife's? Was there ever man, however great his moral strength, however exalted his intellectual height, whose powers could not be increased by a wife's aid, or enfeebled by the down-dragging weight of her unsympathetic opposition? The man to whom she is united (when that union is not a mere, formal

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