Man and Woman

AN eloquent, true, and beautiful article from the pen of a woman and a wife (and no woman not a wife, do we believe fully competent to write on this subject), recently met our eyes in the pages of a periodical. Its title was "Conjugial Love." The Latin word conjugial was used by the writer to indicate the true spiritual union of man and wife in contradistinction to the mere natural union as expressed in the word conjugal. From this article let us make an extract--

"Man is an angular mathematical form, exactly true, but not beautiful. Woman seizes this form, and from the crucible of her warm love she moulds the truth into grace and beauty. For man's understanding deals in outermost truths. But the Lord has blessed woman with perceptive faculties above the sphere of man's reason, and while he looks to the outermost relations of things she at a glance perceives the inmost. Hence she becomes, as it were, the soul of his thought; she is the will and he the intellectual principle; she is governed and guided by him, while he in all things is modified by her will, and scarce recognises his own crude thought in her plastic feminine representation of it; hence he thinks oftentimes that he acts from her wisdom, forgetting that she has no wisdom except through him.

"Thus woman dwells in the heart of man, as in some fair and stately palace, and she looks forth into his garden of Eden, his whole spirit world of thought; she knows every lofty tree, every blooming flower and odorous plant and herb for the use of man, and every singing bird that soars heavenward in her beautiful domain, and she culls the fairest of flowers and weaves bright garlands, and adorns the brow of her beloved with his own thoughts, while he even thinks that she is bestowing treasures out of herself upon him. This gives to woman a sportive grace, a gentle lovingness, an apparent wilfulness, a delight in the power which she has through man, while she knows that he is the link that binds her to Heaven, and thus she is humble and grateful and yielding in the height of her power. How beautiful is the life of conjugial partners! The woman flows into the thought of man like influent life; she knows all things that are in him, hence she can adapt herself to his every variation; she calms him when excited, elevates him when he is depressed, regulates him by her heaven-given power, as a good heart regulates the judgment. The Lord loves the man through the woman, and loves the woman through the man, and these two distinct and separate confluent streams, from the fountain of Divine life, rejoice in their blessed and beautiful union, as like ever does when it meets its like. And it is only when the two streams unite that they can reflect the Divine image; they are noisy, turbulent, and turbid; until the meeting of the waters of life, and then in a calm, serene, deep, and beautiful blessedness they flow on so softly and smoothly that the holy heavens and the