5. This Scriptural law is confirmed by the providential law which secures the numerical equality of the sexes. Had polygamy been according to the divine purpose, we should naturally expect that more women would be born than men. But the reverse is the fact. There are more men than women born into the world. The excess, however, is only sufficient to provide for the greater peril to life to which men are exposed. The law of providence is the numerical equality of the sexes ; and this is a clear inti- mation of the will of God that every man should have his own wife, and every woman her own husband. Such being the will of God, as revealed both in his word and in his providence, every- thing which tends to counteract it must be evil in its nature and consequences. The doctrine which depreciated marriage, and made celibacy a virtue, flooded the Church with corruption. And everything in our modern civilization and modes of living which renders marriage difficult, and consequently infrequent, is to be deprecated, and if possible removed. That every man should have his own wife and every woman her own husband, is the divinely appointed preventive of the " Social Evil" with all its unutterable horrors.1 Every other preventive is human and worthless. Rather than that the present state of things should continue, it would be better to return to the old patriarchal usage, and let parents give their sons and daughters in marriage as soon as they attained the proper age, on the best terms they can.
6. As all the permanently obligatory laws of God are founded on the nature of his creatures, it follows that if He has ordained that marriage must be the union of one man and one woman, there must be a reason for this in the very constitution of man and in the nature of the marriage relation. That relation must be such that it cannot subsist between one and many ; between one man and more than one woman. This is plain, first, from the nature of the love which it involves ; and secondly, from the nature of the union which it constitutes. First, conjugal love is peculiar and exclusive. It can have but one object. As the love of a mother for a child is peculiar, and can have no other object than her own child, so the love of a husband can have no other object than his wife, and the love of a wife no other object than her husband. It is a love not only of complacency and delight, but also of possession, of property, and of rightful ownership. This is the reason why jealousy in man or woman is the fiercest of all
1 The fact that men and women, who make the murder of infants a profession, are roll- ing in wealth, is enough to rouse any community from its false security.
884 PART m. Ch. XIX — THE LAW.
human passions. It involves a sense of injury ; of the violation of the most sacred rights ; more sacred even than the rights of property or life. Conjugal love, therefore, cannot by possibility exist except between one man and one woman. Monogamy has its foundation in the very constitution of our nature. Polygamy is unnatural, and necessarily destructive of the normal, or divinely constituted relation between husband and wife.
Secondly, in another aspect, the union involved in marriage can- not exist except between one man and one woman. It is not merely a union of feeling and of interests. It is such a union as to pro- duce, in some sense, identity. The two become one. Such is the declaration of our Lord. Husband and wife are one, in a sense which justified the Apostle in saying as he does, in Ephesians v. 30, that the wife is bone of her husband's bone, and flesh of his flesh. She is his body. She is himself (v. 28). Such is this union that " Qui uxorem repudiat, quasi dimidiam sui partem a seipso avel- lit. Hoc autem minime patitur natura, ut corpus suum quisque discerpat." What all this means it may be hard for us to under- stand. It is certain, — (1.) That it does not refer to anything material, or to any identification of substance. When Adam said of Eve, " This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh," he doubtless referred to her being formed out of his body. But as these words are used by the Apostle to express the relation of all wives to their husbands, they must be understood of something else than identity of substance. (2.) The oneness of man and wife, of which the Scriptures speak, cannot be understood in any sense inconsistent with their distinct subsistence or personality. They may be very different in character and destiny. The one may be saved, the other lost. (3.) It is evident, however, that the meaning of the strong language of Scripture on this subject is not exhausted, by representing the marriage union as being merely one of affection ; or by saying that the husband is the complement of the wife and the wife of the husband ; that is, that the marriage relation is necessary to the completeness of our nature and to its full development in the present state of exist- ence ; that there are capacities, feelings, and virtues which are not otherwise or elsewhere called into exercise. All this may be true, but it is not the whole truth. (4.) There is, in a certain sense, a community of life between husband and wife. We are accus- tomed to say, and to say truly, that the life of parents is commu- nicated to their children. Each nation and every historical family has a form of life by which it is distinguished. As, therefore, the