Page:Wedding ring fit for the finger, or, The salve of divinity on the sore of humanity.pdf/8

 8 " and perish." Marriages do turn mutability into the image of eternity : it springs up new buds, when the old are withered. greater honour for a man to be the father of one son, than to be the master of many ser- vants. Without a wife, children cannot be had lawfully; without a good wife, children cannot be hand comfortably. Man and woman, as the stock and the scion, being grafted in marriage, are trees bearing fruit to the world. Augustine says, " They are the first link of "human society, to which ail the rest are "joined." Mankind had long ago decayed, and been like a taper fallen into the socket, if those breaches which are made by mortality were not repaired by matrimony! 3. It is not good in regard of the church, which could not then have been expatiated. Where there is no generation, there can be no regeneration, Nature makes us creatures, before grace makes us Christians. If the loins of men had been less fruitful, the death of Christ. would have been less successful. It was a witty question that one put to him that said, " Marriage fills the earth, but virginity fills the heavens :" How cab the heavens be full if the earth be empty ? Had Adam lived in innocency without matrimony, there would have been no servants of God in the Church militant, nor no saints with God in the church triumphant. But I will not sink this vessel by the over-burthen of it, nor press this truth to death, by laying too great a load upon its shoulders. There is one knot which I must. untie, before I make a farther progress, 1 Cor.