Page:Marriage Its Origin, Uses, and Duties.pdf/14

, whose love shall have a continual tendency to improvement and happiness. By this means it is also provided that the man shall be preserved in the single love, the love of growing wise, and the woman shall be kept in the single love, the love of the man's wisdom; from which they derive their faculty and inclination to re-unite, so as again to become as it were one man.

If this view of the subject be admitted, it will be perceived that sex is grounded in the very constitution of the human soul, and, therefore, that it is essentially spiritual, and consequently eternal.

II. Having spoken of the distinction of sex, we now come to speak of marriage itself, for the sake of which that distinction exists. As the distinction of the sexes had its first and highest origin in the distinction of love and wisdom in God, marriage has its first and highest origin in the union of love and wisdom in God. The union of love and wisdom in the Lord may truly be called THE DIVINE MARRIAGE. From this Divine marriage creation itself had its birth; for God created all things from his Divine love by his Divine wisdom. From this cause it is, that in all created things there is some resemblance of marriage. We see it in the union of heat and light in the sun, God's highest emblem in nature,—the united operation of which, as in the time of spring, produces a type of creation itself, the earth being then restored from its winterly, inanimate state to one of renewed order,