Page:Wedding-ring fit for the finger.pdf/17

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another to love; and they should love one-another notwithstanding of provocation. Take heed of poisoning those springs from whence the streams of your pleasure flow.

4. By his delighting in her society: a wife takes sanctuary not only in her husband's house, but in his heart. The tree of love should grow up in the family, as the tree of lifo grew up in tho garden of Eden. They that choose their love, should love their choice. They that marry where they affect not, will affect where they marry not. Two joined together without love, are but tied together to make one another miserable. And so I pass to the last stage of the text, A help-meet.

'A help,' thero is her fallness; 'A meet-help,' there is her fitness. The angels were too much above him; the inferior creatures too much below him; he could not step up to the former, nor could he stoop down to the latter; the one was out of his reach, the other was out of his raco; but tho woman is a parallel line drawn equal with him. Meet she must be in three things.

1. In the harmony of her disposition. Husband and wife should be like the image in a looking-glass, that answers in all properties to the face that stands before it; or like an echo, that returneth the voice it receiveth. Many marriages are like putting new wine into old bottles. An old man is not a meet-help for a young woman: He that sets a grey head upon green shoulders, hath ono foot in the grave and another in the cradle: Yet, how many times do you see the spring of youth wedded to tho winter of old age?—A young man is not a meet-help for an old woman; raw flesh is but an ill plaister for rotten bones. He that in his non-age marries another in her dotage, his lust hath one wife