Do You Love Honor More than Your Wife? You Should.

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Henry Knox was one of the most illustrious figures of the American Revolution. A fat, intellectual bookseller before the war, Knox was the last person you’d expect to rise to be a great general and America’s first Secretary of War, but by a combination of hard work and natural intelligence he achieved seemingly impossible feats on the battlefield. Indeed, historians regard him as one of the greatest masters of artillery the eighteenth century produced.

There is a story of his early involvement in the war. During the opening salvos outside of Boston, it’s said that his wife called to him to come home and take refuge. Knox ran instead toward the sound of the guns. As he put it, “My wife called, but my country called louder.”

Knox’s behavior invokes the famous line from Robert Lovelace, which since achieved the status of a proverb: “I could not love you, dear, so much / loved I not honor more.”

A noble sentiment, and one I find is borne out in practice. Whether in going off to fight in a war or in "laying down the law" about the house, I think most women much prefer men to do what they think is right, even if it contradicts what the women themselves would prefer. Lucy Knox certainly would have preferred her husband to stay at home, but then he wouldn’t have been such a fine man and so worthy of her love if he had.

No love, apart from God's, is absolute.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis repeatedly emphasized the point that no love, apart from the love of God, is safe to set up as an absolute. Briefly, you cannot love anyone as you ought if you love them above all. Men who love their wives above all are figures of ridicule; ‘henpecked’ is the term generally applied to them. It is men who love other things more than their wives who inspire fervent love and devotion.

Henry Knox and his wife were a most devoted couple, as were George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Ulysses and Julia Grant, and so on; all couples in which the man’s honor obliged him often to leave his wife for months or even years at a time. Because as much as these men loved their wives, they needed to do what they thought was right, even if it meant putting their wives second for a time.

What is honor?

Of course, what you ought to love above all else is God. He alone has absolute command of your affections and ought to be first in all things. In practical terms, however, this means that you should value doing the right thing above all else, for keeping the Commandments is the proper way of serving the Lord. Doing the right thing, whatever the cost, is what is meant by ‘honor.’

Thus, to love honor is to love righteousness, and every woman has the right to expect the man she loves to be a righteous man. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

Living honor in daily life: doing what is right or what is easy.

Of course, honor isn’t only expressed in momentous, world-shaking events like the American Revolution. In fact, it’s mostly expressed in small, day-to-day affairs in which we are offered the chance to do either what is right or what is easy.

There’s an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show that illustrates this well (if you haven’t seen the show, you should check it out; it’s a ton of fun, and has more raw talent packed into a relatively small cast than half the shows of today have all put together). The episode sees Rob (Van Dyke), a TV writer, discovering that he has to take a business trip to review a new performer his show might want to hire. Only the trouble is, the trip would mean missing his son’s school play. Rob doesn’t want to miss the play, but feels that his responsibility to his job has to take precedence in this case, especially since getting out of the trip would mean lying to his boss. His wife, Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) thinks he ought to put his son’s play first, and pressures him into lying his way out of the trip.

However, after sleeping on it (and having a hilarious nightmare) Rob decides that he needs to be the one to make this decision and goes on the trip. Laura’s angry at first, and Rob spends the trip feeling guilty, but when he gets home she admits that she’d much rather he do what he thinks is right than cater to her wishes every time. The fact that he is willing to honor his responsibilities, even when it is difficult, is precisely what makes him a good husband and father.

Such a small domestic argument probably isn’t what comes to mind when you think of the word ‘honor,’ but for most of us, this is how the matter will manifest itself; not in a decision whether to run home or fight for the freedom of your nation, but in the simple question of which of two competing responsibilities in daily life you will give precedence to.

What happens when your spouse disagrees? Who wins?

Naturally, differences on right and wrong should be rare between a husband and wife who have properly prepared for marriage. Agreement on those issues is one of the most basic elements of a successful relationship and ought to be dealt with well before going to the altar. But, life and human nature being what they are, even if you fundamentally agree on right and wrong, sooner or later you’ll find yourselves at odds, if nothing else because men and women are simply different and tend to prioritize different things.

The Dick van Dyke example is a typical scenario. When do you need to prioritize your public and professional responsibilities versus your personal and familial responsibilities? Because, though family has to come first in the end, on a day-to-day basis there must be balance, and you won’t always agree on what that balance will look like in each case. Most of the time, you should be able to work out an agreement, but perhaps not always. If you can’t, or if it’s a question that won’t allow for agreement, then at the end of the day, you simply have to do what you think is right, even if it’s not what your spouse wants.

Marriage is made stronger by spouses who choose the good.

This isn’t, of course, to say you can simply overrule your spouse whenever you want, or that such disputes are likely to be a common fact of marriage. It’s that, if a situation does arise, where you honestly have to choose between pleasing your spouse and doing what you think is right, you should always choose the latter, whether it involves something as enormous as the fate of nations or as trivial as a work trip. This may cause some strife in the short-term, but will ultimately make your marriage stronger.

For it is in these small, everyday occurrences that our true characters are shown. If we aren’t honorable in small matters, who will trust us with great ones? And if our wives see that we act honorably, even in such minor things, and even in face of their opposition, they will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can trust us to act honorably in more important things.

It is our duty to cultivate a love of honor above all else. For we will only be able to love our wives properly if we love honor more.

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