How to Choose a Wife by Henry Ward Beecher

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 13, 1869

How to Choose a Wife.

By Henry Ward Beecher

Jacob’s father forbade him to take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. Why? Because he knew that with the wife he would take the religion; that had he brought into his house the fairest and discreetest of wives he would have brought in the cause of a long train of miseries with her. It is an old proverb, that a man is what his wife will let him be; and old Isaac was a wise man when he said, “Don’t go among the Canaanites to get a wife.” Canaan now-a-days is everywhere. It is every house where there has been no family prayer, where mammon is God; wherever there is a godless household, there is the land of Canaan.

A man that marries a good wife has very little more to ask of the Lord till he dies. A good wife is a blessing from the Lord, and there are very few blessings that he gives now or hereafter that are comparable to it. And marriage is a thing not heedlessly to be rushed into, but slowly, discreetly. It is anything but a fancy or a calculation. It is a matter of moral judgment and duty as high as any duty that lifts itself between you and the face of God. As for Ishmael, he gets married out of spite. There have been a good many men who have married out of a rebound of passion, of whom this is a typical instance. It is not the first time that a man has forsworn his own good out of spite to somebody else.—Henry Ward Beecher.