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The following Sermon is printed, partly because some who heard it wished to possess it, and partly because it has been suggested to me that it would be useful for distribution as a tract. It is simply what I have called it, “a plain Sermon,” written and printed for ordinary hearers and readers.
St. Matthew, xix, 3, 4, 5, 6.
The Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him, and saying unto Him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?
And He answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
“The priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth.” This was part of the reproof which God, through the prophet Malachi,[3] administered to His priests and His people, for not teaching and not learning the divine will respecting idolatry and adultery.
The words may well arouse us, my brethren—God’s priests and God’s people—from the apathy which would neither proclaim nor seek for the teaching of the Word of God, in the time of a great moral and religious crisis. You all know, probably, to what I allude. There is a bill now before the Lower House of Parliament, having passed the Upper House, which proposes to make it a common law of the land, that Christian marriages may, in certain cases, be wholly dissolved, and that the divorced persons may re-marry in the lifetimes of those from whom they have been divorced. Yea, and even more: the bill would give full liberty (designedly it would seem, from the language of its advocates) to the person whose guilt has rendered the divorce possible, to perpetuate that guilt in company with the first partner in it, and to dignify the union by the appellation of Holy Matrimony.
Now, my brethren, I could adduce many moral reasons why we should take alarm at the most distant prospect of such a state of things, and set ourselves most earnestly to work, if not to oppose it, yet at least to put it off, until we have had time to judge of its expediency and its consequences; but I take a higher stand, and I entreat you to do so—a religious stand. The Word of God deals with the question of marriage, and legislates upon it; God prescribes the qualifications for it, the duties of it, the nature and endurance of its covenant, and the prohibitions against entering upon it.
Are you prepared, my brethren, to say that all that is now proposed as law of the land is in harmony with the law of God? Recollect you do say so, if you do not strongly deny it and protest against it. “He that is not with me is against me.”
God Himself deals with this whole question. Have you so investigated the subject, as to feel convinced that man only proposes now to carry out God’s law? If you were appealed to to petition against this bill, or to pray that it may be put off, would your refusal to do so (if you refused) be grounded upon a thorough conviction, formed from devout and careful study of God’s Word, that there was nothing religiously wrong in the measure! No! To many of you the trumpet has appeared to give an uncertain sound, and you have not prepared yourselves for the battle. “The priest’s lips have not kept knowledge, and you have not sought the law at his mouth,” or anywhere else.
I say not this in idle declamation against others, dear brethren. I exempt not myself when I say that the vast majority of God’s priests and people have long remained in strange and culpable ignorance or indifference about the teaching of God, and the occasional human legislation on this subject; and that it is only very gradually that they are being awakened, and led to the knowledge of what has Divine sanction and what has human sanction, and consequently to a correct judgment, as to what should be done at this crisis.