October Sixteenth.
MARRIAGE.
"So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them."—Gen. i. 27.
FROM these words we should understand not only that the Lord made them male and female in their bodily forms and functions, but that He made them in all things respectively male and female, so that all the powers both of head and will in the male have a distinct masculine character; and the corresponding powers in the female have an equally distinct feminine character: and these distinct and contrasting peculiarities prove that, independently of the natural tendency to each other, they are formed for a union of souls and of eternal interests, In this union of souls, wisdom joins with affection, strength with weakness, courage with timidity, firmness with feeling, and dignity with beauty. Indeed, each principle and quality in the one sex is formed to unite with its like, and yet, in some sense, contrasting correlative in the other; and it is this circumstance that causes every thing proceeding from the one sex to appear to the other as unceasingly imbued and adorned with the graces and freshness of inexhaustible novelty, and never tiring variety and beauty. As the relation between the sexes is thus a compendium of all the relations that can exist between human beings, whether spiritual, moral, intellectual, temporal, or eternal, together with additional uses peculiar to marriage, it results that the all-bounteous Creator has collated into Mar-
