About this time, too, the profanation of the word Love, rose to its height. The French Naturalists, Buffon and others, borrowed it from the sentimental Novelists: the Swedish and English Philosophers took the contagion; and the Muse of Science condescended to seek admission into the Saloons of Fashion and Frivolity, rouged like a harlot, and with the harlot's wanton leer. I know not how the Annals of Guilt could be better forced into the service of Virtue, than by such a Comment on the present paragraph, as would be afforded by a selection from the sentimental correspondence produced in Courts of Justice within the last thirty years, fairly translated into the true meaning of the words, and the actual Object and Purpose of the infamous writers.
Do you in good earnest aim at Dignity of Character? By all the treasures of a peaceful mind, by all the charms of an open countenance, I conjure you, O youth! turn away from those who live in the Twilight between Vice and Virtue. Are not Reason, Discrimination, Law, and deliberate Choice, the distinguishing Characters of Humanity? Can aught, then, worthy of a human Being, proceed from a Habit of Soul, which would exclude all these and (to borrow a metaphor from Paganism) prefer the den of Trophonius to the Temple and Oracles of the God of Light? Can any thing manly, I say, proceed from those, who for Law and Light would substitute shapeless feelings, sentiments, impulses, which as far as they differ from the vital workings in the brute animals, owe the difference to their former connexion with the proper Virtues of Humanity; as dendrites derive the outlines, that constitute their value above other clay-stones, from the casual neighbourhood and pressure of the plants, the names of which they assume? Remember, that Love itself in its highest earthly Bearing, as the ground of the marriage union,[38] becomes Love by an inward fiat of the Will, by a completing and sealing Act of Moral Election, and lays claim to permanence only under the form of duty.
[35] This paragraph is abridged from the Watchman, No. IV. March 25 1796; respecting which the inquisitive Reader may consult my 'Literary Life.'—Author's note in editions 1 (1825) and 1836, since suppressed.—ed.
[36] Coleridge's 'Reflections On Having Left a Place of Retirement,' l. 48, &c. ('Sibylline Leaves,' 1797).—Ed.
[37] There sometimes occurs an apparent play on words, which not only to the Moralizer, but even to the philosophical Etymologist, appears more than a mere Play. Thus in the double sense of the word, become. I have known persons so anxious to have their dress become them, as to convert it at length into their proper self, and thus actually to become the dress. Such a one, (safeliest spoken of by the neuter pronoun), I consider as but a suit of live finery. It is indifferent whether we say—It becomes he, or, he becomes it.
[38] It might be a mean of preventing many unhappy marriages, if the youth of both sexes had it early impressed on their minds, that Marriage contracted between Christians is a true and perfect Symbol or Mystery; that is, the actualizing Faith being supposed to exist in the Receivers, it is an outward Sign co-essential with that which it signifies, or a living Part of that, the whole of which it represents. Marriage, therefore, in the Christian sense (Ephesians v. 22-33), as symbolical of the union of the Soul with Christ the Mediator, and with God through Christ, is perfectly a sacramental ordinance, and not retained by the Reformed Churches as one of the Sacraments, for two reasons; first, that the Sign is not distinctive of the Church of Christ, and the Ordinance not peculiar nor owing its origin to the Gospel Dispensation; secondly, it is not of universal obligation, not a means of Grace enjoined on all Christians. In other and plainer words, Marriage does not contain in itself an open Profession of Christ, and it is not a Sacrament of the Church, but only of certain Individual Members of the Church. It is evident, however, that neither of these reasons affect or diminish the religious nature and dedicative force of the marriage Vow, or detract from the solemnity in the Apostolic Declaration: This is a great Mystery.
The interest which the state has in the appropriation of one woman to one man, and the civil obligations therefrom resulting, form an altogether distinct consideration. When I meditate on the words of the Apostle, confirmed and illustrated as they are, by so many harmonies in the Spiritual Structure of our proper Humanity, (in the image of God, male and female created he the man), and then reflect how little claim so large a number of legal cohabitations have to the name of Christian marriages—I feel inclined to doubt whether the plan of celebrating marriages universally by the Civil Magistrate, in the first instance, and leaving the religious Covenant and sacramental Pledge to the election of the parties themselves, adopted during the Republic in England, and in our own times by the French Legislature, was not in fact, whatever it might be in intention, reverential to Christianity. At all events, it was their own act and choice, if the parties made bad worse by the profanation of a Gospel Mystery.