X.

MARRIAGE.

THE most sacred relation of humanity is that of husband and wife. They stand for more than father and mother, or parents and children, be cause they are the fountain from which these relations spring; and, changing the mere man and woman into these sacred names, makes that a glory which were otherwise a shame.

According to the Bible, it is a relation as old as our human history; and nothing outside of the Bible, that I know of, contradicts this testimony. Other old books cast the matter into other forms, as they themselves are the product of other races; but the whole story looks like this, when it is told, that in the beginning the divine power made man and woman, and set them on the throne of the world, and gave them from the first the grace to be husband and wife, to find in each other the counterpart and com pletion of their own being. 206

While the creation over which they were given dominion followed its special instinct, and sought its lair or made its nest, there brought forth its young, and before another spring knew them for its own no more than if they were on another continent, this husband and wife made them a home, reared a family, were steadfast not for a few months, but for a lifetime, to those that were born of their body; sent them out in due time, to do as they had done, but still counted them and their children as an intimate belonging of the old homestead; and so this human race has never evened itself with the beasts that perish, except as it has become lower and worse. It is husband and wife wherever you find themhe the weapon-man and she the web-man, as the old Anglo-Saxon Bible translates those words of Jesus, where he says, "Have ye not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female he the weapon-man, she the web-man; he the defender, and she the clother; he the warrior, and she the weaver; each indispensable to the other, and both indispensable to the whole."

The divine alchemy, if I may use the word,

that transmutes the man and woman into hus band and wife, is marriage. It always has been so, and no doubt always will be. The observ. ance of marriage as a ceremony is a very dif ferent thing in different countries and times, ranging all the way from the custom of the Australian black, who beats the maiden he will take until she is insensible, and then carries her off to his hut, to the pure and simple ceremonial used in the best Protestant communions. In the grossest savagery, marriage is, as a rule, as rude and brutal as possible. As we rise in the true scale of life it takes a nobler and better form, and on the summits of life it is a sacrament, and the most awful sacrament, perhaps, we can ever take, and the most certain, if we take it unworthily, to bring damnation. But from the rudest and most brutal savage, to. the truest American, marriage,—the loftiest and best, as I believe, on the planet, it is always, in some sense, the same thing that is done in this union. It turns the man and woman into husband and wife, creates the beginning of a home, insures a true and welcome identity between parents and offspring, binds life together between one gen

eration and another, and out of the kingdom of Nature helps to bring the kingdom of God. "For marriage," Bishop Taylor says, "like the bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness, labors, and unites into societies and republics, keeps order, exercises many virtues, promotes the general interest of mankind, and is that state of good to which God has designed the present constitution of the world."

Marriage is a divine institution, because there is a divine reason for it in our life. So, wher Jesus said, "A man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one. What God, therefore, hath joined together, let no man put asunder;" it was the sequel and conclusion to what he had said a moment before, that God had made it so in the beginning. A true marriage is, therefore, always a religious act in itself, because religion means the binding of one to another, whether it be on earth or in heaven, in a true and pure union. So the Scriptures never command this relation; they only recognize, and bless, and guard it. Everything seems to be settled once for all, from their own beautiful and holy vision

of it, when the man wakes before the fall, sees the woman that God has brought to him, recog nizes her as a part of his very self, takes her to his heart, and God is there as the witness, and blesses them.

Marriage, in the Bible, stands forth as a divine fact, rather than a divine commandment: it is intimately one with our creation. The blessing of God is already within that on which the minister calls the blessing of God to descend. To a true wedding of two human souls and lives nothing can be added but religious ceremonial and the proper social safeguards. The man and woman, in a true wedding, become husband and wife, because their Creator made them for each other, just as much as he made Adam and Eve for each other, and brought them face to face, as he did in Eden. And so when it is really true to those who take part in it, the good old-fashioned Quaker wedding is nearest the truth of God, in which the man and woman declare, as the ground of their union, that they have been moved to this deed by the Holy Spirit. That declaration not only brings the Lord to the marriage, but makes him alse the match-maker; and it must be