THE SLAYER OF THE STRONG.

GEN. ii, 18. And the Lord God said: It is not good that man should be alone: I will make him an helpmeet for him.

Malachi ii, 15. And did he not make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a goodly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.

Heb. xiii, 4. Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

Matth. v, 27, 28. Prov. v, vi, and vii chapters.

In

GOD originally created man male and female. physical attributes the one is the complement of the other; each setting off the other and compensating for that in which there is a deficiency. Strength and weakness, manliness and beauty, power and grace belong to neither in combination. But the one is set off against the other, the one is the complement of the other, and so together, they form a complete humanity. Thus far God has followed the same law in respect to man and the brutes. In the one, as in the other, there is everywhere this constitutional distinction, this same diversity of physical forms and functions, separating the entire animal world into two departments, and securing, through this diversity, a continuity of existence. It may be more marked and complete in man, but the same radical division, in its main features, is apparent in all the tribes of the brute creation. Now if man were but a brute; if, like them, he was created for merely physical objects

and were destined, after he had existed a few years and propagated his kind, to pass away forever; if, in his creation, no higher objects were contemplated than those which mark the destinies of inferior animals, and in his nature there were no powers that lifted him above this base condition and gave promise of an infinitely more exalted sphere in which he might move, then indeed we should see no reason why, in all his intercourse with his kind, he should not follow a similar law to that which governs cattle the law of blind instinct and physical impulse: then he might claim and enjoy the brutal privilege of recognizing no moral law, no divine command in his sensual pleasures; of rioting on every object that could gratify his senses and enthrone impulse, and instinct, and opportunity as the law of God imposed upon his nature, as the high warrant for wallowing in the mire of a filthy sensualism. But instead of thus resigning humanity to the same law which governs the rest of animal life, immediately after the creation and amid the innocence and loveliness of nature in all forms yet unaffected by sin, God institutes the relation of marriage. In the very act of establishing this rule for our race, he recognizes in us a character and attributes separating us from, and exalting us above, the brute; he recognizes us as capable of being controlled by reason and affected by moral considerations; he considers us as entitled to the benefit of a higher and nobler dispensation, and qualified to profit by a totally different regimen of social life from that which prevails among the inferior races. Marriage is itself the divine testimony to our exalted nature; the divine recognition in us of spiritual capacities, and rational powers, and a destiny that reaches beyond the visible framework of things, and finds its fullest development in another

world. It is only among beings of exalted natures, where the intellectual and the spiritual are lords of the physical; where the mind, and the heart, and the conscience lead instinct and impulse that marriage is at all possible. For there is in it a spiritual union, and there spring out of it reciprocal duties, and there go forth from it precious influences that are utterly out of the question, except as the beings bound together by this sacred tie are themselves rational, and moral, and capacitated for a higher existence than that which ends with this life. And I hold that the institution of marriage, while it demonstrates the wisdom and beneficence of Jehovah, in imposing it as the law of humanity, does, at the same time, demonstrate the inspiration of that word in which alone the only true and rational account of its origin is given to the world-that while the world recognizes it as binding upon all men, this book alone discloses its first beginning, and regulates it according to its original design.

But passing by the consideration that the very institution of marriage, as a law for our race different from that given to brutes, is an express recognition of our superiority, and sets us off in a loftier position, and anticipates for us a nobler destiny-passing by this thought, I hasten to another which grows out of it, viz: that marriage is constituted ultimately for a moral and religious purpose; that it contemplates a state of things. in which the mind may best unfold itself, the heart grow strong in all wisdom and holiness; that the physical is designed to bear up the moral; and that the whole nature of man, in his highest state of purity and peace, welcomes this institution as a blessing of wide and rich beneficence to our race. He who has no higher idea of it than of a mere sensual gratification, must ever regard it

as a rigid and burdensome restriction, and he himself must have a soul too gross for the idea of purity to dwell therein too corrupt and blind to compass the moral power and glory that lie hid in this institution of paradise. Marriage is the fundamental source and law of the family, and as such, it underlies the state and the church; it is the first, and the strongest, and the profoundest influence in society; it lies deeper than all else, and it hath relations of richer significance and greater power to the whole human race than any other institution of this world. Let us go into this family; let us contemplate those two beings united together for all their earthly pilgrimage; let us see the family rising around them as its supports; let us, trace out the mutual influences which here combine to educate the hearts of all, and bind them together, and fit them to go forth into life, established in all the principles of goodness. And here you are to suffer me to speak of the institution of marriage, and of the family in its own nature, and adaptations, and tendencies-as a field for human culture, and a power for the education of men in all that is best and noblest for this world and the world to come. Nor am I to be deterred from this by the vision of disordered and ill-regulated families of households where discord and selfishness, where parental folly and childish depravity, have marred this handiwork of the Creator, and abused, or neglected to use for a high purpose, the power it imparts. I said that marriage recognizes in man a high and rational nature; that it contemplates a being who can reason correctly; that unless men are reasonable and moral, marriage is not for them, and they may just as well go down at once to the state of cattle. When men and women - parents amid a rising

family degrade their reason and their hearts, and,

instead of using their high gifts in such a noble position for a high purpose, they take leave of common sense and common honesty, then it is not the fault of marriage that it does not attain in them the blessed objects proposed in its institution. It is due to a strange perversity in those who use and abuse it, that it has not lifted them up and enabled them to accomplish that which is pure and lovely. Depravity can ruin and destroy anything in this world: it nailed Jesus to the cross; it hath turned governments into tyrannies, and the very church of Christ into the abode of unclean spirits. It is not necessary to dwell at length upon the force of evil in this connection. The family is a power originally adverse to it- a power adapted to curb and restrain it; which, when religion dwells there, constitutes the finest position from which those intent upon it may aid each other in all that is good, and guard most effectually against all that is evil.

Behold, then, two beings united in this sacred bond; pledged to each other for life; bound to seek each other's good through all the changes of time; residing together in the closest of all intimacies, and that intimacy bearing upon its face the sanction of Heaven, and answering to the very purpose of God in their creation. The very basis and cement of their union is a genuine and exclusive affection, a mutual sympathy, and a peculiar consciousness that they are necessary to each other— that in this abiding union is their highest earthly happiness, and that there are no others in this world that can sustain to them this relation, or receive this affection. They are set apart thus, by that high affection which God has capacitated the soul to exercise, from all the world. They are one in heart, one in interest, one in aim, and one in the view of society; and so there is room for the play of mutual affection, and the constant