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159 good happenings of mankind might be increased.

 In the marriage covenant, the parties engage their personal love and fidelity and the wife expressly promises obedience to her husband. Nature, says one, may have made and left the sexes of the human species, nearly equal, in their faculties and perfectly so in their rights, but to guard against those competitions, which are equality, or a contested superiority is almost sure to produce, the christian religion enjoins upon the wife, that obedience which she promises and in terms so peremptory and absolute, that it seems to extend to every thing, not criminal, or not entirely inconsistent with the woman's happyness. Let the wife, says St. Paul, be subject to her own husband in all things. The ornament of a meek and quiet (speaking of the duty of wives) is in the sight of God of great price. No words ever expressed the true merit of the female character so well as these. Their obedience in all things lawful is due from the wife, on account perhaps of the man's priority in creation, and the woman's being taken out of the man to whom nature has given greater strength of body and fortitude of mind and fitted for the more arduous labors of life. 
   Besides that mutual and endearing love which should ever subsist between husband and wife never meet with discord or ?, this duty now sometimes is frequently commanded in the new testament. 1 Peter 3.1. Likewise, ye wives be in subjection to your own husbands that if any obey not the word, they may be won by the conversation of the wives, while they behold your chaste? conversation coupled with fear, whose adorn.g let it not be that outward adorn.g of plait.g the hair and wearing of gold, or of put.g on of apparel, but let it be the hiden man of the heart, even the ornaments of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of grace.