New-York daily tribune. [volume] (New-York [N.Y.]) 1842-1866, 1854-07-25
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE.

That human well-beng can be affected to but
limited extent by the action of courts and cabinets
legislators sud judges was long ago observed. The
happiness or misery Of the great majority Is deter
mined by influences which closely surround the hum
BILE. rural hearth and are but remotely affected by
kings and presidents 1t is possible to write yoluml
nous histories of England wherein no mention Is made
of Quaker Fox, or Isaac Watts or John Wesley; yet
these three men have exerted control over the
English character and fortunes than any three kings
strtesmen or generals. No popular contemporary h'to
ran of the Augustan age of the Roman world said
knew or cared aught concerning such obscure Juaean
fanatics and agitaors the Nazarene mystic Jesusor
the spostate Pharisee Saul And it is thus in all
ages-we trust not so papably in ours-that the des-
TIMES of mankind, whether for good or evil. are
shaped ard remodeled by influences humble and
despsed in the day of their activity. The case par
allels that of the insect whose eggs are deposited
without attracting any notice or exciting any appre-
henson yet in due time those eggs are Matched into
an innumerable host of cormOrants, individually in
significant but collectively formidable, by which the
food of nation is destroyed and its people reduced
to despair.
Ours is an age of comparative mental activity.
Books sermons and lectures abound; and the world
is said to be rapidly suppanting ignorance by knowl-
edge; though when closely scanned, it is found that
less than fourth of the human race are this day
making any conscious progress, while the great ma
iory are sunk in deepest darkness And even here,
where volumes, treatses and tracts are being multi
piled so rapidly and many are running TO and fro
as dispensers of light and truth, it is deporably true
that the knowledge most needed by the vast Orty
practical knowledge of their own complex physical
moral and intellectual naure-has no tract societies
no missionaries devoted TO its dispensation and is
very slowly and scantily disseminated In this year
of grace 1854, and under the full blaze glare of
Christianity and Civilization, there probably as
many debauchees gluttOns and sots as there ever
were, and many thousands who commenced this very
year sound in bodily constitution and uncorrupted in
morals will close it ned in health and character and
doomed henceforth to lives of vicious indulgence and
to deaths of agony and shame.
The people perish for lack of vision" They are
vaguely told that they must not do this that-but
the reason rhy they must not-the considerations
deeply grounded in their own natures as also in the
constitution of the universe and strengthened by the
Just demands of socety-uhch should impel them to
shun and reject those indulgences which inure and
destroy-this is not made plain TO them. So in the
very shadow OF our abundant and costly schOohOuses,
churches, colleges youth this day educating them
selves into the daily use of tobacco, Of alcohol and
other noxious stimuants thus profaning their bodies
and corruptng their appetes into fierce demands for
undeniably vicious and ruinous qualifications And
go in defiance of all expensive enginery for moral
and intellectual development, society is manufactur
ing libertines and drunkards, drones and villains
about as fast as ever it did, and the wrecks of
hood and of womanhood strewn along our streets
as numerous and hopeless in the earlier, darker
age when the Messiah compassiOnatey healed lepers
restored lost vision, and cast out devils.
We DO not undervslue the enginery of Moral Re
form in operation all around US. 1t is doing grea
good, even though better directed it might do more
1t of,enest fails through heedlessness or misudgn.
contempt of the intellectual errors which snderl
the practical evil, Z: would Cen5a;. F.r every y.c,