099. Worldly Marriages

Worldly Marriages

1Sa_25:2 : ’93And there was a man in Maon whose possessions were in Carmel, and the man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep and a thousand goats.’94

My text introduces us to a drunken bloat of large property. Before the day of safety deposits and government bonds and national banks, people had their investment in flocks and herds, and this man, Nabal, of the text, had much of his possessions in live-stock. He came also of a distinguished family, and had glorious Caleb for an ancestor. But this descendant was a sneak, a churl, a sot and a fool. One instance to illustrate: It was a wool-raising country, and at the time of shearing a great feast was prepared for the shearers; and David and his warriors, who had in other days saved from destruction the threshing-floors of Nabal, sent to him, asking, in this time of plenty, for some bread for their hungry men. And Nabal cried out: ’93Who is David?’94 As though an Englishman had said, ’93Who is Wellington?’94 or a German should say, ’93Who is Von Moltke?’94 or an American should say, ’93Who is Washington?’94 Nothing did Nabal give to the starving men, and that night the scoundrel lay dead drunk at home; and the Bible gives us a full length picture of him, sprawling and maudlin and helpless.

Now that was the man whom Abigail, the lovely and gracious and good woman, married’97a tuberose planted beside a thistle, a palm-branch twined into a wreath of deadly nightshade. Surely that was not one of the matches made in heaven. We throw up our hands in horror at that wedding. How did she ever consent to link her destinies with such a creature? Well, she no doubt thought that it would be an honor to be associated with an aristocratic family; and no one can despise a great name. Beside that, wealth would come, and with it chains of gold, in mansions lighted by swinging lamps of aromatic oil, and resounding with the cheer of banqueters, seated at tables laden with wines from the richest vineyards, with fruit from ripest orchards, and nuts threshed from foreign woods, and meats smoking in platters of gold, carried by slaves in bright uniform. Before she plighted her troth with this dissipated man, she sometimes said to herself: ’93How can I endure him? To be associated for life with such a debauchee I cannot and will not!’94 But then again she said to herself: ’93It is time I was married, and this is a cold world to depend on, and perhaps I might do worse, and may be I will make a sober man out of him, and marriage is a lottery anyhow.’94 And when, one day, this representative of a great house presented himself in a parenthesis of sobriety, and with assumed geniality and gallantry of manner, and with promises of fidelity and kindness and self-abnegation, a June morning smiled on a March squall, and the great-souled woman surrendered her happiness to the keeping of this infamous son of fortune, whose possessions were in Carmel; ’93and the man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep and a thousand goats.’94

Behold here a domestic tragedy repeated every hour of every day, all over Christendom’97marriage for worldly success, without regard to character. So Marie Jeanne Philipon, the daughter of the humble engraver, became the famous Madame Roland of history, the vivacious and brilliant girl, united with the cold, formal, monotonous man, because he came of an affluent family of Amiens, and had lordly blood in his veins. The day when, through political revolution, this patriotic woman was led to the scaffold, around which lay piles of human heads that had fallen from the ax, and she said to an aged man whom she had comforted as they ascended the scaffold, ’93Go first, that you may not witness my death,’94 and then, undaunted, took her turn to die’97that day was to her only the last act of a tragedy, of which her marriage day was the first.

Good and genial character in a man, the very first requisite for a woman’92s happy marriage. Mistake me not as depreciative of worldly prosperities. There is a religious cant that would seem to represent poverty as a virtue and wealth as a crime. I can take you through a thousand mansions where God is as much worshiped as he ever was in a cabin. The Gospel inculcates the virtues which tend toward wealth. In the millennium we will all dwell in palaces, and ride in chariots, and sit at sumptuous banquets, and sleep under rich embroideries, and live four or five hundred years, for, if according to the Bible, in those times a child shall die a hundred years old, the average human life will be at least five centuries.

The whole tendency of sin is toward poverty, and the whole tendency of righteousness is toward wealth. Godliness is profitable for the life that now is, as well as for that which is to come. No inventory can be made of the picture galleries consecrated to God, or of sculpture, or of libraries, pillared magnificence, of parks and fountains and gardens in the ownership of good men and women. The two most lordly residences in which I was ever a guest had morning and evening prayers, all the employees present, and all day long there was an air of cheerful piety in the conversation and behavior. Lord Radstock carried the Gospel to the Russian nobility. Lord Cavan and Lord Cairns spent their vacation in evangelistic services. Lord Congleton became missionary to Bagdad. And the Christ who was born in an Eastern caravansary has lived in a palace.

It is a grand thing to have plenty of money; to own horses that do not compel you to take the dust of every lumbering and lazy vehicle, and books of history that give you a glimpse of all the past, and shelves of poetry to which you may go and ask Milton or Tennyson or Spencer or Tom Moore or Robert Burns to step down and spend an evening with you; and other shelves to which you may go while you feel disgusted with the shams of the world, and ask Thackeray to express your chagrin, or Charles Dickens to expose Pecksniffianism, or Thomas Carlyle to thunder your indignation; or the other shelves where the old Gospel writers stand ready to warn and cheer us, while they open doors into that City which is so bright the noonday sun is abolished.

There is no virtue in owning a horse that takes four minutes to go a mile, if you can own one that can go in a little over two minutes and a half; no virtue in running into the teeth of a northeast wind with thin apparel if you can afford furs; no virtue in being poor when you can honestly be rich. There are names of men and women that I have only to mention, and they suggest not only wealth, but religion and generosity and philanthropy, such as Amos Lawrence, James Lenox, Peter Cooper, William E. Dodge, Lord Shaftesbury, Miss Catherine Wolfe, Mrs. Astor, and Miss Helen Gould. A recent writer says that of fifty leading business men in one of our Eastern cities, and of the fifty leading business men of one of our Western cities, three-fourths of them are Christians. The fact is, that about all the brain and the business genius is on the side of religion. Infidelity is incipient insanity. All infidels are cranks. Many of them talk brightly, but you soon find that in their mental machinery there is a screw loose. When they are not lecturing against Christianity they are sitting in barrooms, squirting tobacco juice, and when they get mad swear till the place is sulphurous. They only talk to keep their courage up, and at last will feel like the infidel who begged to be buried with his Christian wife and daughter, and when asked why he wanted such burial, replied: ’93If there be a resurrection of the good, as some folks say there will be, my Christian wife and daughter will somehow get me up and take me along with them.’94

Men may pretend to despise religion, but they are rank hypocrites. The sea-captain was right when he came up to the village on the seacoast, and insisted on paying ten dollars to the church, although he did not attend himself. When asked his reason, he said that he had been in the habit of carrying cargoes of oysters and clams from that place, and he found, since that church was built, the people were more honest than they used to be, for before the church was built he often found the load, when he came to count it, a thousand clams short. Yes. Godliness is profitable for both worlds. Most of the great, honest, permanent worldly successes are by those who reverence God and the Bible. But what I do say is that if a man have nothing but social position and financial resources, a woman who puts her happiness by marriage in his hand, re-enacts the folly of Abigail when she accepted disagreeable Nabal, ’93whose possessions were in Carmel; and the man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep and a thousand goats.’94

If there be good moral character accompanied by affluent circumstances, I congratulate you. If not, let the morning lark fly clear of the Rocky Mountain eagle. The sacrifice of woman on the altar of social and financial expectation is cruel and stupendous. I sketch you a scene you have more than once witnessed. A comfortable home, with nothing more than ordinary surroundings; but an attractive daughter carefully and Christianly reared. From the outside world comes in a man with nothing but money, unless you count profanity and selfishness and fondness for champagne and general recklessness as part of his possessions. He has his coat collar turned up when there is no chill in the air, not because he is cold, but because it gives him an air of abandon; and eyeglass, not because he is nearsighted, but because it gives a classical appearance; and with an attire somewhat loud, a cane thick enough to be the club of Hercules and clutched at the middle, his conversation interlarded with French phrases inaccurately pronounced, and a sweep of manner indicating that he was not born like most folks, but terrestrially landed. By arts learned of the devil he insinuates himself into the affections of the daughter of that Christian home. All the kindred congratulate her on the auspicious prospects. Reports come in that the young man is fast in his habits, that he has broken several young hearts, and that he is mean and selfish and cruel. But all this is covered up with the fact that he has several houses in his own name, and has large deposits at the bank, and, more than all, has a father worth many hundred thousand dollars and in very feeble health, who may any day drop off, and this is the only son. If a round dollar held close to one’92s eye is large enough to shut out a great desert, how much more will several bushels of dollars shut out! The marriage day comes and goes. The wedding ring was costly enough and the orange blossoms fragrant enough and the benediction solemn enough and the wedding march stirring enough. The audience shed tears of sympathetic gladness, supposing that the craft containing the two has sailed off on a placid lake, although God knows that they are launched on a dead sea, its waters brackish with tears and ghastly with upturned faces of despair, floating to the surface and then going down. There they are, the newly-married pair in their new home. He turns out to be a tyrant. Her will is nothing, his will everything. Lavish of money for his own pleasure, he begrudges her the pennies he doles out into her trembling palm. Instead of the kind words she left behind in her former home, now there are complaints and fault-findings. He is the master and she the slave.

The worst villain on earth is the man who, having captured a woman from her father’92s house, and after the oath of the marriage altar has been pronounced, says, by his manner if not his words: ’93I have you now in my power. What can you do? My arm is stronger than yours. My voice is louder than yours. My fortune is greater than yours. My name is mightier than yours. Now crouch before me like a dog. Now crawl away from me like a reptile. You are nothing but a woman anyhow. Down, you miserable wretch!’94 Can halls of mosaic, can long lines of Etruscan bronze, or statuary by Palmer and Powers and Crawford and Chantry and Canova, can galleries rich from the pencil of Bierstadt and Church and Kenset and Cole and Cropsey, could flutes played on by an Ole Bull or pianos fingered by a Gottschalk or solos warbled by a Sonntag, could wardrobes like those of a Marie Antoinette, could jewels like those of a Eugenie, make a wife in such a companionship happy? Imprisoned in a castle! Her gold bracelets are the chains of a lifelong servitude. There is a sword over her every feast, not like that of Damocles, not staying suspended, but dropping through her lacerated heart. Her wardrobe is full of shrouds for deaths which she dies daily, and she is buried alive, though buried under gorgeous upholstery. There is one word that sounds under the arches, that rolls along the corridors and weeps in the falling fountains, that echoes in the shutting of every door, and groans in every note of stringed and wind instrument: ’93Woe! Woe!’94 The oxen and sheep, in olden times, brought to a temple of Jupiter to be sacrificed, used to be covered with ribbons and flowers’97ribbons on the horns and flowers on the neck. But the floral and ribboned decoration did not make the stab of the butcher’92s knife less deathful, and all the chandeliers you hang over such a woman, and all the robes with which you enwrap her, and all the ribbons with which you adorn her, and all the bewitching charms with which you embank her footsteps are the ribbons and flowers of a horrible butchery.

As if to show how wretched a good woman may be in splendid surroundings, we have two recent illustrations, two ducal palaces in Great Britain. They are the foci of the best things that are possible in art, in literature, in architecture, the accumulation of other estates, until their wealth is beyond calculation, and their grandeur beyond description. One of the castles has a cabinet set with gems that cost two million five hundred thousand dollars and the walls of it bloom with Rembrandts and Claudes and Pouissins and Guidos and Raphaels, and there are Southdown flocks in summer grazing on its lawns, and Arab steeds prancing at the doorways on the ’93first open day at the kennels.’94 From the one castle the duchess has removed with her children, because she can no longer endure the orgies of her husband, the duke, and in the other castle the duchess remains confronted by insults and abominations, in the presence of which I do not think God or decent society requires a good woman to remain.

Alas for the ducal country seats; They on a large scale illustrate what on a smaller scale may be seen in many places, that without moral character in a husband, all the accessories of wealth are to a wife’92s soul tantalization and mockery. When Abigail found Nabal, her husband, beastly drunk, as she came home from interceding for his fortune and life, it was no alleviation that the old brute had possessions in Carmel, and ’93was very great, and had three thousand sheep and one thousand goats,’94 and he the worst goat among them. The animal in his nature seized the soul and ran off with it. Before things are right in this world genteel villains are to be expurgated. Instead of being welcomed into respectable society because of the number of stars and garters and medals and estates they represent, they ought to be fumigated two or three years before they are allowed to put their hand on the door-knob of a moral house. The time must come when a masculine estray will be as repugnant to good society as a feminine estray, and no coat of arms or family emblazonry or epaulet can pass a Lothario unchallenged among the sanctities of home life. By what law of God or common sense is an Absalom better than a Delilah, a Don Juan better than a Messalina? The brush that paints the one black must paint the other black.

But what a spectacle it was when one summer much of ’93watering-place’94 society went wild with enthusiasm over an unclean foreign dignitary, whose name in both hemispheres is a synonym for profligacy, and princesses of American society from all parts of the land had him ride in their carriages and sit at their tables, though they knew him to be a portable lazaretto, a charnel house of moral putrefaction, his breath a typhoid, his foot that of a Satyr, and his touch death. Here is an evil that man cannot stop, but woman may. Keep all such out of your parlors, have no recognition for them in the street, and no more think of allying your life and destiny with theirs than ’93gales from Araby’94 would consent to pass the honeymoon with an Egyptian plague. All the money or social position a bad man brings to a woman in marriage is a splendid despair, a gilded horror, a brilliant agony, a prolonged death; and the longer the marital union lasts, the more evident will be the fact that she might better never have been born. Yet you and I have been at brilliant weddings, where, before the feast was over, the bridegroom’92s tongue was thick and his eye glassy and his step a stagger, as he clicked glasses with jolly comrades, all going, with lightning express train, to the fatal crash over the embankment of a ruined life and a lost eternity.

Woman, join not your right hand with such a right hand. Accept from such an one no jewel for finger or ear, lest that sparkle of precious stone turn out to be the eye of a basilisk; and let not the ring come on the finger of your left hand, lest that ring turn out to be one link of a chain that shall bind you in never-ending captivity. In the name of God and heaven and home, in the name of all time and all eternity, I forbid the banns! Consent not to join one of the many regiments of women who have married for worldly success without regard to moral character. If you are ambitious for noble affiancing, why not marry a king? And to that honor you are invited by the Monarch of heaven and earth, and this day a voice from the sky sounds forth: ’93As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.’94 Let him put upon thee the ring of this royal marriage. Here is an honor worth reaching after. By repentance and faith you may come into a marriage with the Emperor of universal dominion, and you may be an Empress unto God forever, and reign with him in palaces that the centuries cannot crumble, or cannonades demolish.

High, worldly marriage is not necessary, or marriage of any kind, in order to your happiness. Celibacy has been honored by the best Being that ever lived and by his greatest apostle’97Christ and Paul. What higher honor could single life on earth have? But what you need, O woman, is to be affianced forever and forever, and the banns of that marriage I am now ready to publish. Let the angels of heaven bend from their galleries of light to witness, while I pronounce you one’97a loving God and a forgiven soul.

One of the most stirring passages in history with which I am acquainted tells us how Cleopatra, the exiled Queen of Egypt, won the sympathies of Julius C’e6sar, the conqueror, until he became the bridegroom, and she the bride. Driven from her throne, she sailed away on the Mediterranean sea in a storm, and when the large ship anchored, she put out with one womanly friend in a small boat, until she arrived at Alexandria, where was C’e6sar, the great general. Knowing that she would not be permitted to land or pass the guards on the way to C’e6sar’92s palace, she laid upon the bottom of the boat some shawls and scarfs and richly dyed upholstery, and then laid down upon them, and her friend wrapped her in them, and she was admitted ashore in this wrapping of goods, which was announced as a present for C’e6sar. This bundle was permitted to pass the guards of the gates of the palace and was put down at the feet of the Roman general. When the bundle was unrolled, there rose before C’e6sar one whose courage and beauty and brilliancy are the astonishment of the ages. This exiled queen of Egypt told the story of her sorrows, and he promised her that she should get back her throne in Egypt and take the throne of wifely dominion in his own heart. Afterward they made a triumphal tour in a barge which the pictures of many art galleries have called ’93Cleopatra’92s Barge,’94 and that barge was covered with silken awning, and its deck was soft with luxuriant carpets, and the oars were silver-tipped, and the prow was gold-mounted, and the air was redolent with the spicery of tropical gardens, and resonant with the music that made the night glad as the day.

You may rejoice, O woman, that you are not a Cleopatra, and that the One to whom you may be affianced had none of the sins of C’e6sar, the conqueror. But it suggests to me how you, a soul exiled from happiness and peace, may find your way to the feet of the Conqueror of earth and sky. Though it may be a dark night of spiritual agitation in which you put out, you may sail into the harbor of peace, and when all the wrappings of fear and doubt and sin shall be removed, you will be found at the feet of him who will put you on a throne to be acknowledged as his in the day when all the silver trumpets of the sky shall proclaim: ’93Behold the bridegroom cometh;’94 and in a barge of light you sail with him the river whose source is the foot of the throne, and whose mouth is at the sea of glass mingled with fire.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage