The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1899-09-22
THE MARRIAGE VOWS
The Ease with Which They Are
Broken Is Deplored.
Timely Discourse of DIR. TaImaEe on
the Marital ReIatiOnS-Uni-
form Divorce Laws Are
Needed.
Copyright. 1899, by Louis Klopsch.l
Washington

Copyright, 1899, by Louis Klopsch.l
Washington,
DR.. Talmage in this discourse 61s-
cusses a question of national impor-
tance, which is confessedly as difficult
as it is urgent. The text is Matthew
1876: What therefore God hath joined
together let no man put asunder."
That there are hundreds and thou
sands of infelicitous homes in America
no one will doubt. If there were only
one skeleton in the closet, that might be
locked up and abandoned, but in many
a home there is a skeleton in the hall
way and a skeleton in all the apart
ments. "Unhappily married" are two
words descriptive of many homestead.
1t needs no orthodox minister to prove
to a badly mated pair that there is
hell. They are there now. Sometimes
a grand and gracious woman will be
thus incarcerated, and her life will be
crucifiXion, as was the case with Mrs.
Sigourney, the great poetess and the
great soul. Sometimes a consecrated
man will be united to a fury, as was
John Wesley, or united to a vixen, as
was John Milton. Sometimes, and gen
orally, both parties are to blame, and
Thomas Carlyle is an intolerable grum-
bier, and bis wife has pungent retort
always ready, and Froude, the his
torian, pledged to tell the plain truth,
has to pull aside the curtain from the
lifelong squabble at Craigenputtock
and Cheyne row.
Some say that for the alienation of
all these domestic disorders of which we
hear easy divorce is a good prescription!
God sometimes authorizes divorce as
certainly as he authorizes marriage. l
have just as much regard for one law
fully divorced as have for one lawfully
married. But you know and know that
wholesale divorce is one of our national
scourges. l am not surprised at this
when l think of the influences which
have been abroad initiating against the
marriage relation. For many years the
platforms of the country rang with talk
about free love millennium. There
were meetings of this kind held in the
Academy of Music, Brooklyn; Cooper
institute, New York; fremont temple,
Boston, and all over the land. Some of
the women who were most prominent
in that movement have since been dis
tinguished for great prOmiscuosity of
affection. Popular themes for such oc-
casions were the tyranny of man, the
oppression of the marriage relation,
women's rights and the affinities.
Prominent speakers were women with
short curls and short dress and very
long tongue, everlastingly at war with
God because they were created women,
while on the platform sat meek men
with soft accent and cowed demeanor,
apologetic for masculinity and holding
the parasols while the termagant ora
tors went on preaching the gospel of
free love. That campaign of about 20
years set more devils into the marriage
relation than will be exercised in the
next so. Men and women went home
from such meetings so permanently
confused as to who were their wives
and husbands that they never got out of
the perpleXity, and the criminal and the
civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad
of woes, and this one got alimony, and
that one got limited divorce, and this
mother kept the children on condition
that the father could sometimes come
and look at them, and these went into
pOorhouses, and those went into an in
sane asylum, and those went into dis
solute public life, and all went to de-
struction. The mightiest war ever made
against the marriage institution was
that free love campaign, sometimes uu-
der one name and sometimes under an
other.
Another influence that has warred
upon the marriage relation has been
polTgamy in Utah. That is a stereo-
typed caricature of the marriage re-
lation and has poisoned the whole land.
You might as well think that you can
hive an arm in a state of modification
and yet the whole body not be sickened
as to have any territories or states
polygamized and yet the body of the
nation not feel the putrefaction. Hear
it, good men and women OF America,
that so long ago as 1862 law was passed
by congress forbidding polygamy in the
territories and in all the places where
they had jurisdiction. Thirty-seven
years have passed along and nine ad-
ministrations, yet not until the passage
of the Edmunds law in 1882 was any
active policy of polygamic suppression
adopted. Armed with all the power of
governmentand having an army at their
disposal, the first brick had not till then
been knocked from that fortress of lib
ertinism. Every new president in his
inaugural tickled that monster with TIE
straw of condemnation ond ovary- am
gress stultified itself in proposing some
plan that would not work Polygamy
stood in Utah and in other of the terri
tories more intrenched, more brazen,
more puissant, more braggart and more
internal than at any time in it's history.
James Buchanan, much abused man of
his day, did more for the eXtirpation of
this villainy than all the subsequent ad-
ministrations dared to do up to 1882.
Mr.. Buchanan sent out an army, and,
it was halted in its work, still
he accomplished more than the subse-
quent administrations, which did moth
ing but talk, talk, talk. Even at this
late day and with the Edmunds act in
force the evil has not been wholly ex-
tirpated. Polygamy in Utah, though
outlawed, is still practiced in secret. 1t
has warred against the marriage rela-
ton throughout the land. 1t is impos-
sible to have such an awful sewer of in
quity sending up its miasma, which is
waited by the winds north. south, east
and west without the whole land being
affected by it,