The Wedding Ring / A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating Matrimony

by T. De Witt Talmage

For more compactness and that we may be more useful we are gathered in still smaller circles in the home group. And there you have the same varieties again; brothers, sisters, husband and wife; all different in temperaments and tastes. It is fortunate that it should be so. If the husband be all impulse, the wife must be all prudence. If one sister be sanguine in her temperament, the other must be lymphatic. Mary and Martha are necessities. There will be no dinner for Christ if there be no Martha; there will be no audience for Jesus if there be no Mary. The home organization is most beautifully constructed. Eden has gone; the bowers are all broken down; the animals that Adam stroked with his hand that morning when they came up to get their names have since shot forth tusk and sting and growled, panther at panther; in mid-air iron beaks plunge till with clotted wing and eyeless sockets the twain come whirling down from under the sun in blood and fire. Eden has gone, but there is just one little fragment left. It floated down on the River Hiddekel out of Paradise. It is the marriage institution. It does not, as at the beginning, take away from man a rib. Now it is an addition of ribs.

THE HOME ASSAULTED.

This institution of marriage has been defamed in our day, and influences are abroad trying to turn this earth into a Turkish harem or a great Salt Lake City. While the pulpits have been comparatively silent, novels—their cheapness only equalled by their nastiness—are trying to educate, have taken upon themselves to educate, this nation in regard to holy marriage, which makes or breaks for time and eternity. Oh, this is not a mere question of residence or wardrobe! It is a question charged with gigantic joy or sorrow, with heaven or hell. Alas for this new dispensation of George Sands! Alas for the mingling of the nightshade with the marriage garlands! Alas for the venom of adders spit into the tankards! Alas for the white frosts of eternal death that kill the orange blossoms! The Gospel of Jesus Christ is to assert what is right and to assert what is wrong.

THE ASSAULT OF THE SORDID.

Attempt has been made to take the marriage institution, which was intended for the happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a mere commercial enterprise; an exchange of houses and lands and equipage; a business partnership of two, stuffed up with the stories of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness and feminine angelhood. The two after a while have roused up to find that, instead of the paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van Amburgh's menagerie, filled with tigers and wild-cats. Twenty thousand divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution that France ever saw. It was only the first course in that banquet of hell; and I tell you what you know as well as I do, that wrong notions on the subject of Christian marriage are the cause at this day of more moral outrage before God and man than any other cause.

There are some things that I want to bring before you. I know there are those of you who have had homes set up for a great many years; and then there are those here who have just established their home. They have only been in it a few months or a few years. Then there are those who will, after awhile, set up for themselves a home, and it is right that I should speak out upon these themes.

THE BENEFICENT GUEST.

My first counsel to you is, have Jesus in your new home, if it be a new home, and let Him who was a guest at Bethany be in your household; let the divine blessing drop upon your every hope and plan and expectation. Those young people who begin with God end with heaven. Have on your right hand the engagement ring of the divine affection. If one of you be a Christian, let that one take a Bible and read a few verses in the evening-time, and then kneel down and commend yourselves to Him who setteth the solitary in families. I want to tell you that the destroying angel passes by without touching or entering the door-post sprinkled with the blood of the everlasting covenant. Why is it that in some families they never get along, and in others they always get along well? I have watched such cases, and have come to a conclusion. In the first instance, nothing seemed to go pleasantly, and after awhile came devastation, domestic disaster or estrangement. Why? They started wrong! In the other case, although there were hardships and trials, and some things that had to be explained, still things went on pleasantly until the very last. Why? They started right!

FORBEARANCE NEEDED.

My advice to you in your home is to exercise to the very last possibility of your nature the law of forbearance. Prayers in the household will not make up for everything. Some of the best people in the world are the hardest to get along with. There are people who stand up in prayer-meetings and pray like angels, who at home are uncompromising and cranky. You may not have everything just as you want it. Sometimes it will be the duty of the husband, and sometimes of the wife, to yield; but both stand punctiliously on your rights, and you will have a Waterloo with no Blucher coming up at nightfall to decide the conflict.