p. 102 | A Happy Married Life

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Aug 29, 1865

A Happy Married Life.

WHEN Robert Newton, the Wesleyan pulpit orator, married, he and his bride began the married life by retiring twice each day to pray with and for each other. This practice they kept up, when opportunity served, to the end of life. Mark the result! When an old man, Mr. Newton remarked: "In the course of a short time my wife and I shall celebrate the jubilee of our marriage; and I know not that during the fifty years of our union, an unkind look or an unkind word has ever passed between us."

That was certainly a happy married life. What made it so? No doubt strong mutual affection, congeniality of tastes, habits, and pursuits had much to do with it; but did not religion have more? Did not that hour of daily prayer make the bond of peace so strong, that none of the manifold trials of a long public life could even strain it? Had religion been stricken from their lives, would not pride, vanity, or passion have grown into a power of discord in their hearts? Did such absolute peace ever reign undisturbed over the married life of any irreligious pair for half a century since the fall? Does it reign over the reader's married life? Is not the religious element needed in his married life to render it even tolerable? Consider the claims of religion, my reader, from this stand-point, and you will conclude that religion is needful not only for your present and eternal happiness, but also for your domestic enjoyment.