006. Marriage

Marriage

Gen_2:23 : ’93This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.’94

Morning without a cloud. Atmosphere without a chill. Foliage without a crumpled leaf. Meadows without a thorn. Fit morning for the world’92s first wedding. It shall be in church, the great temple of a world, sky-domed, mountain-pillared, sapphire-roofed. The sparkling waters of the Gihon and the Hiddekel will make the font of the temple. Larks, robins and goldfinches will chant the wedding march. Violet, lily and rose burning incense in the morning sun. Luxuriant vines sweeping their long trails through the forest aisle’97upholstery of a spring morning. Wild beasts standing outside the circle looking on, like family servants from the back door gazing upon the nuptials. The eagle, king of birds; the locust, king of insects; the lion, king of beasts, waiting. Carpets of grass like emerald for the human pair to walk on. Hum of excitement, as there always is before a ceremony. Grass-blades and leaves whispering, and the birds a-chatter, each one to his mate. Hush all the winds, hush all the birds, hush the voices of the waters, for the king of the human race advances and his bride, a perfect man leading to the altar a perfect woman. God, her father, gives away the bride, and angels are the witnesses, and tears of morning dew stand in the eyes of the violets, and Adam takes the round hand that had never been worn with work, or stung with pain, into his own stout grasp, as he says: ’93This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.’94

Tumults of joy break forth, and all the trees of the wood clap their hands, and all the galleries of the forest sound with carol and chirp and chant, and the circle of Edenic happiness is complete; for while every quail hath answering quail, and every fish answering fish, and every fowl answering fowl, and every beast of the forest appropriate companion, at last man, the immortal, has for mate woman, the immortal. Married on the second Tuesday morning in May of the year one, Adam, the first man to Eve, the first woman, high Heaven officiating. Away with the coarse notion that marriage is a mere civil contract! It is a Paradisaical, six-thousand-year-old, divine institution, and all the laws since Blackstone, or before Blackstone, cannot appropriately marry two hearts unless the Lord Almighty has first married them.

I propose to speak to you on the bitter enemies of the marriage relation. The first one that crawls out before our observation is polygamy. More people in this country than ever before believe in this doctrine, and there are those in all parts of the land, some under one name and some under another name, and some under no name at all, practicing it. Not only do Mormons, but a great many who despise that society, believe that the Bible sanctions polygamy, or plurality of wives, and there is not one Christian out of five hundred that can refute the slander. The Bible recognizes polygamy just as it recognizes all other styles of sin, but in no case sanctions it. On the contrary, God expressly thunders against it in the book of Leviticus, while St. Paul puts squarely before the world this passage: ’93Let every man have his own wife, and every woman her own husband.’94

How was it when the children of Israel were passing through the wilderness? For forty years there were two million five hundred thousand Israelites on the march. God especially looked after them, led them by pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire by night, slaked their thirst from the rocks, fed them with manna from heaven’97especially looked after them’97and in all the forty years among two million five hundred thousand Israelites, there was only one case of polygamy on record. Does that look as though God sanctioned it? No such crime attaches to Adam or Noah or Isaac or Joshua or Samuel or a hundred others I might mention. Who was the first polygamist mentioned in the Bible? Lamech; and he by his own confession was a murderer. And wherever in the Bible you find a man with more than one wife, you find him up to his neck in trouble!

David and Solomon were grievously punished for their sins. David dates his letter from the ’93belly of hell,’94 and Solomon says, ’93There is no good under the sun. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’94 Awfully depressed in spirit. Good for him! If he had had nine hundred and ninety-nine less wives, he would have taken a more cheerful view of human society.

The whole drift of the Bible is against polygamy. God said at the beginning, ’93It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a helpmeet for him.’94 Mark you the singular number’97’94a helpmeet.’94 If any one ever needed more than one companion, certainly that was Adam, for there was no society outside. God was there in Eden, starting the institution of marriage, and if plurality of wives had been right, that fact would have been demonstrated, and instead of one rib taken from Adam’92s side, Adam would not have had a rib left. The race was to be bridged over the deluge. How was it done? How many wives did Noah take into the ark? His wife and the wives of his sons. If polygamy had been right, there would have been twenty wives for each, and so saved many more from the drowning. The Bible is not more thoroughly against theft and blasphemy and murder than it is against polygamy.

Moreover, wherever civilization is in high advance, and wherever good morals dominate, you all know there they despise polygamy. Where polygamy exists there may be a house, a large house, and a splendid house, but no home. Suppose four or five or ten or twenty other queens tried to sit upon the same throne with Victoria’97how much happiness in England would there be? Just as much as there will be happiness in any domestic establishment where more than one wife tries to be queen.

God intended woman to be man’92s equal, but in the polygamous state that is impossible. The whole implication is that it takes ten or twenty or thirty women to be equal to one man; it is very complimentary to the man, but not to the woman. All that poetry about man’92s being the oak and woman the ivy is flat and stale and untrue. In tens of thousands of cases men in commercial disaster have been flung flat, and they have gone to their homes utterly discouraged, ready to give up the struggle of life, wishing they were dead’97although when a man says he wishes he were dead he lies; try to kill him and see how he wishes he were dead’97but still going home utterly discouraged, and the wife by her prayer and faith in God has given him encouragement, and told him never to mind his misfortune, that there was some way of escape, and planned this way and the other, after a while by her courage lifting him up again into commercial prosperity. Who now is the oak, and which is the ivy?

Polygamy is one of the great enemies of the home circle. I like the ring of the utterance of that worldly merchant in New York who, when the secretary of the missionary society said to him, ’93I would like to have a contribution from you for our society,’94 replied, ’93Sir, I can’92t see the importance of that institution, and therefore I have nothing to contribute; but you may call upon my wife, and perhaps she may take a different view of the subject, and she is always free to act at her discretion.’94 Such a beautiful thing as that could not have occurred in a polygamous family.

Again I remark that all those entertainments which men a majority of evenings from their homes are enemies of the domestic relation. I make no indiscriminate assault upon club-houses. I must not be so reported. I know some of them which have a mission’97an artistic mission or a social mission or a political mission or a religious mission. There is hardly a clergyman in these cities who does not belong to a theological club; and men in the same profession and in the same occupation and in the same position in life often club together. Indeed, if I had an unhappy home, or no home at all, I should seek out the very best club-house I could find, pay the admission fee, and spend my evenings there in conversation and in reading.

But it has always been a mystery to me that men happy in their families, while compelled to go to business at eight or nine o’92clock each morning, not getting back until the evening repast at six or seven o’92clock’97how they could find so many hours for absence. One would think that a man could once in a while, at any rate, stand it two hours with his family’97from seven to nine o’92clock. I have never known a man destroyed by being too domestic in his habits, or too fond of his home life, while I could unroll the scroll of thousands of names of men who lost their fortunes and lost their morals and lost their immortal souls by just the opposite course.

When a man likes any place better than his own home, look out for breakers. How can you tell whether a man loves his home better than other places? By this infallible rule: a man always stays the most where he likes it the best. One man out of a hundred may have so firm a will, and be so confirmed in his morals, that he may spend every evening for forty years away from home, and yet be pure and good and honest; but the ninety-nine out of the hundred will go down under the process, and the years will be merely a pair of stairs to let them down into immorality and into death. Ask the good, intelligent, Christian men of your acquaintance what they think of all those institutions which take husband and father and son away the majority of the evenings. Some club-houses are very good; some are very polluted. I speak of neither when I say that the average club-house is the greatest foe to domestic life in America. But who built the club-houses throughout all our cities? I answer, in many cases the women. A woman is surprised that she has not as much attention paid to her now as before marriage, as when the man was a suppliant candidate for her preference. Perhaps there might be a retort, and she might be asked if she took as much pains to make herself attractive since marriage as before marriage.

Those women make awful and eternal mistakes who, as soon as the hour of marriage is past, surrender all tastefulness of attire and all those little arts which, though indescribable, go to make up womanly attractiveness. How do you greet him at the door when he comes from the store or office or banking house? Are you as anxious to meet his admiration now as you were the first week of your acquaintance? The fact is that many women make their charms a net for one haul, and after they have made that haul they throw the net away. Before marriage you could play on the piano like a Thalberg or a Gottschalk; now you cannot play at all. Though you have been together sixty years, you ought still to be the bride adorned for her husband.

Or do you spend the evenings fretting about the servants, or decrying the fact that your neighbors have it better than you have, or picking at your husband’92s faults, putting him in a sort of infant class over which you are the superior, when you ought to make home a small heaven to his perturbed spirit. I believe that unwise, fretful and jealous women have built one-half of the club-houses of America.

Let the women of this country read the newspapers and the books ten minutes a day, if they can afford no more time’97and there is not one but can afford as much time as that’97let women read books and newspapers ten minutes a day, and be familiar with the stirring questions of the hour, and be able to hold stout political argument, and that home will be a club-house to which many outsiders will flock. One intelligent woman has more attractiveness than twenty intelligent men. But the lawsuit has started, and the attorneys on both sides have been employed, and the witnesses are in the court-room, and the next case on the calendar is Average Club House versus Family Relation.

Another foe of domestic life is the prevalent doctrine of free love There are newspapers flooding the country with that doctrine. Now the greatest argument against it is that all the advocates of it, without any exception, get to be libertines. First they break up their own home, then they break up the homes of others. Free lovers are nearly always Spiritualists, and they get the people of this world and the next world so mixed up that they do not know who belongs to that or who belongs to ours. Freelovism and Spiritualism are twin sisters, and they are so bankrupt in morals they do not pay one per cent. of righteousness.

I tell the spirits of the next world, if they cannot find any better company in this world than that which they are said to pick out and pick up, they had better stay where they are if they have any regard for their reputation! When people in the marriage relation get what the Spiritualists call an affinity for some one outside that bond, they had better begin studying the ten commandments, beginning just after the middle of the Decalogue. When one gets such an affinity he is on the edge of a fall ten thousand feet down; but at that distance, when he strikes the rocks, he bounds off into the unfathomable.

Again, I remark that a great foe of domestic life is easy divorce. People say, ’93We can go into this relationship somewhat recklessly, for if we get tired and want the knot untied, the law will untie it.’94 In France the law was established that all people who wanted to unmarry might by application be unmarried. Twenty thousand divorces in Paris in one year! Forty-eight thousand outcast children carried into the Foundling Hospital or kindred institutions’97forty-eight thousand foundlings in one year! When the law lets down the bars all the cattle of beastliness break into the garden of home. While Rome was moral there was but one case of divorce recorded in five hundred years. She changed the law; then the deluge. Down went the home. Down went the empire.

Divorce is too easy in this country. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, there were in one year seventy-six divorce suits; in Philadelphia there were two hundred and eighty-four in one year, and it was announced not long ago that in the State of New York divorce suits had increased five hundred per cent. Many get out of the bondage, as they call it, by passing a few months in Illinois or Dakota, where they find easy divorce. Now all this is right if marriage be merely a civil contract. Then you may dispose of a conjugal companion as you would of a barn or a house or a horse; but if it be a divine institution, then let legislators and judges of courts beware how on any other grounds than those announced by the Lord Almighty they unlock this relation.

When it is found out that entering into the marriage contract a man puts his name to that contract not to be erased until it is erased on the marble slab of the sepulcher, then people will use more deliberation and more common sense and more prayer before they take this stupendous step. Instead of being lassoed by a curl or trading hearts in a philopena or marrying ’93just for fun,’94 they will find out that between cradle and grave the most tremendous place is the marriage altar, and that while before that altar the twain stand with joined hands, between them stands, all unseen, either the white-winged angel of blessing or the horned and hoofed and fire-nostriled Gorgon of despair. When a man marries he marries for heaven or for hell.

Again, I remark corrupt literature is a powerful foe to the domestic relation. I refer to those slushy pamphlets and books which tell how impossible men met impossible women, and got into impossible difficulties and with impossible results, and villainy went unwhipped, and virtue fell dead. I mean those books. The fact is that many of the young married people of this day get their heads so filled with the false and sentimental notions in regard to the plain, serious, old-fashioned institution of marriage they are unfit for the common duties of life. There she goes, lounging around the house with a ten-cent novel over her arm, her slippers run down at the heel, the furniture undusted and the socks undarned, and everything from garret to cellar in domestic chaos. Go home and gather up all that infernal stuff and pitch it into the kitchen grate lest it blast you and ruin your children after you. I want to make you, my friends, the sworn enemies of everything that antagonizes the domestic relation. As I suppose the most of you had honorable ancestry, I want to adjure you today by the cradle in which you were rocked, and by the family altar where you knelt, and by the family Bible out of which you were instructed, and by the graves of your parents, if they have gone to their long sleep, to war against everything that would bring the marriage relation into disrepute. The best eulogy you can pronounce upon it is by making your own home relation right and beautiful.

Do not take offense too easily from each other. Remember that hasty words and hasty action sometimes are not a matter of the heart, but merely a matter of the nerves. Husbands at the store worn out with anxieties, wives at home worn out with household cares, sometimes have their equipoise of spirit unbalanced. There are but few American men or women who have any nerves worth speaking of. These delicate telegraphic wires of the human body get damaged in the storm, and the lightnings of temper run over them very irregularly.

And remember that this relation will soon end. Spare all the hard words, omit all the slights, for before long there will be a hearse standing at your front door that will take away out of your presence the best friend you have on earth, and the richest boon which God in his omnipotence and infinity has capacity to bestow’97a good wife. If the wife go, that desolates all the house and all the heart and all the world. The silences are so appalling when her voice is still; the vacancies are so ghastly; the gloom is as though the midnights of fifty years hurtled. The little child running around the room with a hurt finger, calling for mother who will not come, and at night asking for a drink, and saying, ’93No, no; I want mamma to bring it.’94 Reminiscences that rush on the heart like a mountain torrent over which a cloud has burst. Her jewels, her books, her pictures, her dresses, some of them suggestive of banquet and some of burial, put into the trunk whose lid comes down with heavy thud as much as to say, ’93Dead!’94 The morning dead. The night dead. The air dead. The world dead.

Oh, man, if in that hour you think of any unkind words uttered you would be willing to pay in red coin of blood every drop from your heart if you could buy back the unkind words, but they will not come back. Words gone from the lips do not fly in circles like doves coming back to their cote, but in a straight line, a million miles a minute across the eternities. They never come back. Flattering epitaphology, though a Dryden composed it, polished Aberdeen granite, though an Angelo chiseled it, cannot atone for unkindness to the living.

While I speak my mind is full of the memory of a couple who were united in holy marriage December 19th, 1803. Their Christian names were old-fashioned like themselves. David the one, Catharine the other. Legal contract of course, but chiefly the Lord married them. They lived to see their crystal wedding, their silver wedding, their golden wedding, and nine years beside. They lived to weep over the graves of three of their children. They lived to pass through many hardships and trials, but they kept the Christian faith, they lived for God, for each other, for their children, and for everybody but themselves. Their hair grew white with age, and their steps became shorter and shorter, and their voice tremulous in the church psalm, though once they had led in the village choir. The one leaned heavily on a staff which I have in my house today, but heavier on the arm of God, who had always helped them. They were well mated. What was the joy of the one was the joy of the other, what was the sorrow of the one was the sorrow of the other.

At last they parted. God gave to her three years precedence of departure. My father, though a very tender-hearted man, I never saw cry but once, and that at my mother’92s burial. You see they had lived together fifty-nine years. My mother said in her dying moments to my father, ’93Father, wouldn’92t it be pleasant if we could both go together?’94 But the three years soon passed, and they were reunited. Their children are gradually joining them, and will soon all be there; but the vision of that married life will linger in my memory forever. Together in the village church where they stood up to take the vows of the Christian just before their marriage day. Together through all the vicissitudes of a long life. Together this morning in the quiet of the Somerville graveyard. Together in heaven. And in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, there they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife. There also they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife, and there I buried Leah.’94 Oh! there are many in the house this morning who can say with William Cowper:

My boast is not that I deduce my birth

From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth;

But higher far my proud pretensions rise,

The son of parents passed into the skies.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage