Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/455

Rh have given her to him as an honorable wife. These circumstances give rise to murder, infanticide, suicide, disease, remorse, despair, wretchedness, poverty, untimely death, with all the attendant train of jealousies, heartrending miseries, want of confidence in families, contaminating disease, etc.; and, finally, to the horrible license system, in which governments called Christian license their fair daughters, I will not say to play the beast, but to a degradation far beneath them; for every species of the animal creation, except man, refrain from such abominable excesses, and observe in a great measure the laws of nature in procreation.

"I again repeat that Nature has constituted the female differently from the male, and for a different purpose. The strength of the female constitution is designed to flow in a stream of life, to nourish and sustain the embryo, to bring it forth, and to nurse it on her bosom. When Nature is not in operation within her in these particulars and for these heavenly ends, it has wisely provided relief at regular periods, in order that her system may be kept pure and healthy, without exhausting the fountain of life on the one hand, or drying up its river of life on the other, till mature age and an approaching change of worlds render it necessary for her to cease to be fruitful, and give her to rest a while, and enjoy a tranquil life in the midst of that family circle, endeared to her by so many ties, and which may be supposed, at this period of her life, to be approaching the vigor of manhood, and therefore able to comfort and sustain her.

"Not so with man. He has no such drawback upon his strength. It is his to move in a wider sphere. If God shall count him worthy of a hundred fold in this life of wives and children, and houses, and lands, and kindreds, he may even aspire to patriarchal sovereignty, to empire; to be the prince or head of a tribe or tribes; and, like Abraham of old, be able to send forth, for the defense of his country, hundreds and thousands of his own warriors, born in his own house.

"A noble man of God, who is full of the Spirit of the Most High, and is counted worthy to converse with Jehovah or with the Son of God, and to associate with angels and the spirits of just men made perfect—one who will teach his children, and bring them up in the light of unadulterated and eternal truth—is more worthy of a hundred wives and children than the ignorant slave of passion, or of vice and folly, is to have one wife and one child. Indeed, the God of Abraham is so much better pleased with one than with the other, that he would even take away the one talent, which is habitually abused, neglected, or put to an improper use, and give it to him who has ten talents.

"In the patriarchal order of family government the wife is bound to the law of her husband. She honors, 'calls him lord,' even as Sarah obeyed and honored Abraham. She lives for him, and to increase his glory, his greatness, his kingdom, or family. Her affections are centred in her God, her husband, and her children.

"The children are also under his government worlds without end. 'While life, or thought, or being lasts, or immortality endures,' they are bound to obey him as their father and king.

"He also has a head to whom he is responsible. He must keep