is not easily unsnarled. Tell a company that they may look into any
twenty rooms of a large house except one, and their chief desire is to
see that one, though all the others were picture-galleries and that a
garret. If there were in a region of mineral springs twenty fountains,
but the proprietor had fenced in one well against the public, the one
fenced in would be the chief temptation to the visitors, and they
would rather taste of that than of the other nineteen. Solomon
recognized this principle in the text, and also the disaster that
follows forbidden conduct, when he said: "Stolen waters are sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the
dead are there."
In this course of sermons on "The Wedding Ring," I this morning aim a
point-blank shot at "Clandestine Marriages and Escapades."
Yonder comes up through the narrows of New York harbor a ship having
all the evidence of tempestuous passage: salt water-mark reaching to
the top of the smoke-stack; mainmast, foremast, mizzenmast twisted
off; bulwarks knocked in; lifeboats off the davit; jib-sheets and
lee-bowlines missing; captain's bridge demolished; main shaft broken;
all the pumps working to keep from sinking before they can get to
wharfage. That ship is the institution of Christian marriage, launched
by the Lord grandly from the banks of the Euphrates, and floating out
on the seas for the admiration and happiness of all nations. But
free-loveism struck it from one side, and Mormonism struck it from
another side, and hurricanes of libertinism have struck it on all
sides, until the old ship needs repairs in every plank, and beam, and
sail, and bolt, and clamp, and transom, and stanchion. In other words,
the notions of modern society must be reconstructed on the subject of
the marriage institution. And when we have got it back somewhere near
what it was when God built it in Paradise, the earth will be far on
toward resumption of Paradisaical conditions.