indirect. What the divine Founder said at the first is nowhere more plainly illustrated. "Ye are the light of the world: ye are the salt of the earth." The Church is set to maintain an ideal in the midst of human society, and gradually, by the winning attractiveness of that ideal, to draw society itself into harmony and pursuit.
For the best of all reasons Christians, from the very beginning of Christianity, have consecrated the marriage union by solemn and significant religious ceremonies. Marriage, asking so much of the individuals, carrying so rich a freight of blessings, and charged with powers of such irretrievable misery, so noble and in its perversions so degraded, gathering into itself all that makes human life gentle, chivalrous, serviceable, sublime, and by a fatal and malignant Nemesis turning all these graces into elements of infamy for those who profane it, cannot be suffered to lie outside the sanctions and aids of Religion.
