Under the impression that one can be easily released people enter the
relation without inquiry and without reflection. Romance and impulse
rule the day. Perhaps the only ground for the marriage compact is that
she likes his looks and he admires the graceful way she passes around
the ice cream at the picnic! It is all they know about each other. It
is all the preparation for life. A man not able to pay his own board
bill, with not a dollar in his possession, will stand at the altar and
take the loving hand, and say, "With all my worldly goods I thee
endow!" A woman that could not make a loaf of bread to save her life
will swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry an atheist, and
that always makes conjoined wretchedness; for if a man does not
believe there is a God, he is neither to be trusted with a dollar nor
with your lifelong happiness.
Having read much about love in a cottage people brought up in ease
will go and starve in a hovel. Runaway matches and elopements, 999 out
of 1000 of which mean death and hell, multiplying on all hands. You
see them in every day's newspapers. Our ministers in this region have
no defence such as they have in other cities where the banns must be
previously published and an officer of the law must give a certificate
that all is right; so clergymen are left defenceless, and unite those
who ought never to be united. Perhaps they are too young or perhaps
they are standing already in some domestic compact.
By the wreck of ten thousand homes, by the holocaust of ten thousand
sacrificed men and women, by the hearthstone of the family which is
the corner-stone of the State, and in the name of that God who hath
set up the family institution and who hath made the breaking of the
marital oath the most appalling of all perjuries, I implore the
Congress of the United States to make some righteous, uniform law for
all the States and from ocean to ocean, on this subject of marriage
and divorce.