Sentimentalism
61
effect. Many women are suffering from great debility, and with settled
disease, brought upon them because the laws of their being have not
been regarded. Nature’s laws have been trampled upon. The brain
nerve-power is squandered by men and women because called into
unnatural action to gratify base passions; and this hideous monster,
base, low passion; assumes the delicate name of love.
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Many professed Christians are more animal than divine. They are,
in fact, about all animal. A man of this type degrades the wife he has
promised to nourish and cherish. She is made by him an instrument to
minister to the gratification of his low, lustful propensities. Very many
women submit to become slaves to lustful passion. They do not possess
their bodies in sanctification and honor. The wife does not retain the
dignity and self- respect she possessed previous to marriage. This holy
institution should have preserved and increased her womanly respect
and holy dignity. 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 her husband, who does
not regard the laws to which the brute creation yields obedience. The
married life become a galling yoke; for love dies out, and, frequently,
distrust, jealousy, and hate, take its place.
No man can truly love his wife if she will patiently submit to
become his slave, and minister to his degraded passions. She loses,
in her passive submission, 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, perhaps, as tamely submit to be
degraded by another as by himself. He doubts her constancy and purity,
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tires of her, and seeks new objects which will 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 unacquainted
with the elevating, ennobling principles of true, of sanctified, love.
The wife becomes jealous of the husband. She suspects that he
will just as readily pay his addresses to another as to her, if opportunity
should offer. She sees that he is not controlled by conscience, nor the
fear of God. All these sanctified barriers are broken down by lustful
passions. All that is godlike 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