Page:Marriage Its Origin, Uses, and Duties.pdf/19

 eminently spiritual. Thus, while marriage serves the natural use of populating the earth, it is also the source whence heaven is supplied with inhabitants. Without marriage heaven would fail, and human society would be dissolved. Marriage not only provides in all possible cases against the moral and spiritual degeneracy of our race, but, in its orderly condition and right state, provides for their moral and spiritual improvement, by imparting to children better hereditary inclinations, and in affording them such instruction and training as are calculated to make them useful members of society in this world, and happy subjects of the Lord's kingdom in the world to come. Marriage is also the origin of all the ties of relationship, and consequently of all the affections which form them, and which are the chords whose vibrations first awaken tender emotions in the heart. Were not the infant from its birth the subject of the endearments of maternal and paternal love, and successively of the other relative affections, the soul would remain in a great measure desolate and unapproachable, and the very capacity of love to God and mutual love would lie dormant within it. Marriage is, therefore, the divinely-appointed means of introducing the human being into all the natural affections, which are the mediums through which the spiritual are acquired.

Children born of parents who are merely in a natural and not a spiritual state of life, are not, indeed, to be considered as being without the faculty, or