450
Selected Messages Book 2
the marriage hour that many men and women date their success or
failure in this life, and their hopes of the future life.”—
The Adventist
Home, 43
.
Compatibility, Ellen White held, was vitally essential to a happy
marriage. She wrote of “lifelong wretchedness” which may result from
a union of those “not adapted to each other” (
Patriarchs and Prophets,
189
). In a message to youth she declared:
“The world is full of misery and sin today in consequence of ill-
assorted marriages. In many cases it takes only a few months for
husband and wife to realize that their dispositions can never blend; and
the result is that discord prevails in the home, where only the love and
harmony of heaven should exist.”—
The Youth’s Instructor, August 10,
1899
;
Messages to Young People, 453
; and
The Adventist Home, 83
.
She sounded a warning against “a great disparity in age” of those
contemplating marriage, which could result in “impairing the health
of the younger” partner and could rob the children “of physical and
mental strength” (
The Ministry of Healing, 358
).
The state of health of the partners of a contemplated marriage Ellen
White stressed as an important factor. “Sickly men have often won
the affections of women apparently healthy, and because they loved
each other, they felt themselves at perfect liberty to marry, neither
considering that by their union the wife must be a sufferer, more or
less, because of the diseased husband.”—
Selected Messages 2:423
.
And then she carries the matter to its logical conclusion: “If those
who thus enter the marriage relation were alone concerned, the sin
would not be so great. Their offspring are compelled to be sufferers
by disease transmitted to them.”—
Ibid
.
The ability of the partners in a marriage to sustain themselves
financially also was presented by Ellen White as a requisite for a
[483]
successful marriage. She pointed out that there are those “who have
not acquired property” and do “not possess physical strength, or mental
energy, to acquire property” “who have been in haste to marry, and
who have taken upon themselves responsibilities of which they had no
just sense.” But it is the children who often are the greatest sufferers,
for “those who are seriously deficient in business tact, and who are the
least qualified to get along in the world, generally fill their houses with
children” which, she declares, may not be “suitably fed or clothed, and