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Appeal to the Church
417
previous to marriage. This holy institution should have preserved
and increased her womanly respect and holy dignity; but her chaste,
dignified, godlike womanhood has been consumed upon the altar
of base passion; it has been sacrificed to please her husband. She
soon loses respect for the husband, who does not regard the laws to
which the brute creation yield obedience. The married life becomes
a galling yoke; for love dies out, and frequently distrust, jealousy,
and hate take its place.
No man can truly love his wife when she will patiently submit
to become his slave and minister to his depraved passions. In her
passive submission, she loses the value she once possessed in his
eyes. He sees her dragged down from everything elevating, to a
low level; and soon he suspects that she will as tamely submit to be
degraded by another as by himself. He doubts her constancy and
purity, tires of her, and seeks new objects to arouse and intensify his
hellish passions. The law of God is not regarded. These men are
worse than brutes; they are demons in human form. They are unac-
quainted with the elevating, ennobling principles of true, sanctified
love.
[475]
The wife also becomes jealous of the husband and suspects that
if opportunity should offer he would just as readily pay his addresses
to another as to her. She sees that he is not controlled by conscience
or the fear of God; all these sanctified barriers are broken down
by lustful passions; all that is god-like in the husband is made the
servant of low, brutish lust.
The world is filled with men and women of this order; and neat,
tasty, yea, expensive houses contain a hell within. Imagine, if you
can, what must be the offspring of such parents. Will not the children
sink still lower in the scale? The parents give the stamp of character
to their children. Therefore children that are born of these parents
inherit from them qualities of mind which are of a low, base order.
And Satan nourishes anything tending to corruption. The matter
now to be settled is: Shall the wife feel bound to yield implicitly
to the demands of her husband, when she sees that nothing but
base passions control him, and when her reason and judgment are
convinced that she does it to the injury of her body, which God has
enjoined upon her to possess in sanctification and honor, to preserve
as a living sacrifice to God?