November 15, 1857
“It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.” —Matthew v. 31, 32.
Last week I examined a statement, made on very high authority, that the Sermon on the Mount contains a number of rhetorical passages, which cannot in their strict sense be applied to the regulation of our lives. I disputed this assertion altogether. I maintained that the very persons who were supposed to have erred through over-much rigour in construing our Lord’s words, had really erred from explaining them too loosely, from overlooking hints which He had Himself given us to guide us in the understanding of them. I maintained that the application of them to our daily duties had been weakened by this laxity, that they would bear with far greater force upon our conduct if they were not controlled and reduced by the notions of their expounders. Having spoken on those general words, which contain, I think, the principle of the whole discourse, “Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” I proposed to consider two special inferences from our Lord’s doctrines, which have been supposed to be particularly direct and obvious, and to make them impracticable:—First, the inference which has been drawn from His teaching respecting divorce, by ecclesiastics; secondly, the inference which has been drawn from His teaching respecting forgiveness, by Quakers. I begin with the former.
Every one must have observed how often the phrase, “It hath been said of old time,” occurs in the first division of the Sermon on the Mount. On the clear understanding of that phrase, the interpretation of it must in a great measure depend. In the text I have just read to you, and in some others, the phrase is slightly varied. The old time is omitted. The difference is not very important. But as I wish to be as exact as possible in treating language which has been supposed to be loose and vague, I would not pass it by. I think there may be a significance in the change. If we turn to the 19th chapter of St. Matthew, we shall find our Lord answering a question of the Pharisees, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” with the counter-question, “Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning, made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?” Then he adds: “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Then, according to St. Matthew, the Pharisees rejoined, “Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?” In the 10th chapter of St. Mark the conversation is reported somewhat differently. There, Jesus asked the Pharisees, “What did Moses command you? And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the Creation God made them male and female.” Now, as it was the design of our Lord to bring out the truth that Marriage was an institution far older than the Law, not in any sense the creation of the Law, there seems a good reason why the expression “ancients” or “old time,” which is applied in other cases, either to the commandments or to certain venerable maxims of Scripture, should be dispensed with here. No doubt in strictness it was as applicable to the bill of divorcement as to the commandment respecting adultery. But since it was a special object in this passage to impress the hearer with the feeling that there were older times than those which had produced either the permission or the commandment, it may have been purposely dropped lest that impression should have been in any degree weakened.
I rest nothing upon the difference in itself. If some better reading were discovered, which contained the same words that occur in the other clauses of the discourse, I should be perfectly content with it. For the principle which I suppose this variation of phrase may have been intended to indicate, is amply established and sustained by those passages which I have quoted, and by the tenor of our Lord’s discourse. We fancy that He is enacting a new law to supersede an old law. No, He is bringing out that which is older than all penal laws, all laws of tables, a primary part of the human constitution and of the Divine order. He is revealing that which is beneath all positive decrees and enactments, beneath even God’s commandments themselves, that without which they would have no meaning. What would a command not to commit adultery be worth, if there were no marriage existing? How can a bond be broken which has not been formed?
The whole morality of the Pharisees, as we saw last Sunday, proceeded upon the forgetfulness of this obvious and fundamental principle. They looked upon penal laws, not as preserving obligations, but as the foundation of them. And so they made the highest and divinest laws abortive; they contradicted them in the letter as well as in the spirit. They would not look at the reason of the Sabbath-day, as it is stated expressly, formally, emphatically in the Fourth Commandment. They would not suppose that God could care for men-servants and maid-servants, that He could wish them to rest because He rested. Therefore the whole nature of the day was changed. It became not a blessing but a curse, not a day made for men but against men. Precisely on the same ground they supposed the Fifth Commandment to be the ground of the honour that was due to parents, not merely the assertion and vindication of a relation already existing—implied in the life of human beings. Therefore the honour of parents might be neglected, in order to pay honour to Him Who had given the commandment.
I dwelt upon this subject especially last Sunday, not only because there is none which shows so clearly the mind and spirit of the Pharisee, but because there is none which so clearly sets forth the mind and spirit of our Lord, which shows in what sense He was uttering an old truth that had been from the beginning, in what sense He was revealing that which had been kept secret from the foundation of the world. The fatherly relation had existed from the day that Eve brought forth her first-born; the brotherly relation, from the time that the keeper of the flocks and the tiller of the ground grew up together. The earliest book in the Bible, which has nothing to do with the burning mountain or with the laws upon tables, is mainly occupied with setting forth the relations of a single family, a family by which all the families of the earth were to be blessed, —in setting forth these relations as grounded upon the revelation of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. With one hand our Lord was striking at the attempt of the Pharisees to derange the course of their own history, to put that first which God had put second, to subject a constitution to mere decrees. With the other hand He was striking at the denial of the Pharisees of that higher and fuller revelation of God which holy men had lived and died expecting, —that revelation of Him as united to men, not by a formal covenant but in an actual Son,—which He was making with His words and in His acts, which He was to bring out fully in His death and in His resurrection. By basing everything upon outward law, upon a law only concerning outward acts, the Pharisee overthrew that great simple human history which is contained in the lives of the elder Patriarchs. He destroyed the sense and coherency of the prophetical books, their worth as lessons in morals and politics, the grandeur of their poetry, their warnings and their hopes, by robbing them of their leading characteristic,—that they connect all human relations with Divine, that they treat the superstitions and infidelities of the Nation as adulteries from the Lord Who has married it to Himself. By basing everything upon the Nature of God and His Own eternal Sonship, Jesus restored the patriarchal records to their place in the Divine economy, proved that the prophetical records were not a collection of idle figures and vain rhetoric, but direct appeals to the conscience of human beings, preparations for One Who could tell them plainly of the Father.
The Pharisees, I have said, did not merely misrepresent the Patriarchs and the Prophets; they misrepresented the statute law which they worshipped. They confounded permissions and commands. When the Legislator wisely abstained from usurping a dominion over the conscience which he could not exercise, they measured the demands of the conscience by his decrees. The prescription that a man who put away his wife must have a writing of divorcement, was to them as much a rule of life as the precept not to commit adultery. “They were both found in the book; where was the difference?” When men begin to argue thus, we may be quite sure that the two will not be of the same practical validity; that the permissive edict will be obeyed, that the restraining one will be forgotten. The records of this age as they are delivered by Josephus, as they are indicated by the Evangelist, make it evident that this was actually the case in Palestine. The story in the 8th chapter of St. John, whether it should be in that place or not, does not exaggerate the condition of society, even if we suppose the accusers of the woman went out one by one convicted of the very sin with which they had charged her.
On the other hand, there is not a word in our Lord’s discourses, here or elsewhere, which condemns the regulation respecting divorces: “For the hardness of your heart,” He says, “He suffered you to put away your wives.” In these words the Son and Lord over the house justifies, instead of blaming, His faithful servant. By this permission Moses confessed the necessary weakness of all mere enactments. With a clearness of insight which must have been imparted by a higher Wisdom,—it is so contrary to the natural ambition and self-sufficiency of a Legislator, —he saw what the Law cannot do. He saw that his function had respect to transgression; that it presumed hardness of heart; that he had no power to make men love their wives or respect the marriage vow. Keeping the commandment always in sight, adapting his means to the circumstances in which he found himself, because they were indications of God’s purpose, he could do something to prevent outrages upon God’s gracious ordinance, something to keep alive the sense of its being His ordinance. Overdoing might be just as unfavourable to the reverence which was by all means to be cherished, as neglect. The heart might be made harder, not softer, by efforts to force it and crush it. God made them male and female. God said, “Let the twain be one flesh.” Moses may weaken the power of those celestial words by his earthly attempts to render them effectual. Herein I perceive the fidelity of Moses to his divine office. Herein I see how truly he was an inspired man. Herein I discover how he was intended as an example of the modesty, also the courage, which is befitting in legislators of all times;—modesty, to understand just how much they are able in their own sphere to promote an object which is dear to them;—courage, to resolve that they will not go out of their sphere to promote it, by whatever impulses from within or threats from without they may be urged to do so.
But if our Lord does not blame the legislator, He speaks here, as everywhere, to the conscience and spirit of the man: “I say unto you, whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery.” No language can be more distinct. “I am speaking to you, my disciples—to you, common men; not in the least to those who make laws or execute them. I am speaking to you who are living under this Law of Moses, who can, therefore, avail yourselves of the license which that Law allows you. I say to you, whosoever shall put away his wife.” Our translators are strictly right, I conceive, in the first verb they have chosen; unfortunate, when they give a new rendering of the participle of the same verb. The word divorce, in the sense we give to it, was not applicable to the practice of the ordinary Jewish husband. He simply “put away” or “sent away” his wife. The Law insisted that he should obtain a certain document to authorize his act. It was little more than a registration of his procedure. The separation was, to all intents and purposes, his doing; not the decision of any court. I make this remark, that you may feel how entirely the circumstances of the evil which our Lord was rebuking, conspire with His Own divine purpose to explain the object and direction of His words. Then follows the exception about which there has been so much debate, and which some hope to get rid of by referring to the 15th verse of the 16th chapter of St. Luke, where it does not occur. I am most anxious that you should compare those words with these. It will strike you, I think, at once, that ours are much more elaborate; that they occur in a more regular discourse; that they involve a much more careful comparison of the old time with the new. The words in St. Luke are evidently used as an illustration of another topic; they are meant to explain the assertion, that, in the Kingdom of Heaven, into which many were pressing, not a jot or tittle of the Law would be abolished. But this is common to the two passages: each speaks of the man as putting away his wife; neither deals with outward law, or with the permissions which it ought or ought not to grant; that subject is not handled, not even hinted at. The passage in St. Luke, even more obviously than that in St. Matthew, refers to the existing practice of the Jews, and to the notions of the Pharisees.
The next clause of our text illustrates, even more strikingly, the personal character of the command. The man is treated as the guardian of his wife’s life and purity. He must not put away his wife, lest he should cause her to commit adultery. This clause explains, I think, and vindicates the preceding one. If she has already been guilty of the sin, it may be right, it may be a stern duty, not of course a privilege, to treat the bond as broken; it may be right, for her sake as much as for his own, to seek a separation. Such a doctrine (it has been observed, most truly as I think, by a clergyman who has treated this subject) vindicates the sanctity of marriage far more than the one to which it is opposed.
The final clause, “Whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery,” is a direct corollary from the former. If her putting away does not in the sight of God separate her from her first husband, even though it be authorized by the earthly legislator, she is not in the sight of God married to another, even though that marriage be sanctioned by earthly law. Here again Christ is speaking directly to the conscience. A lax outward rule will not acquit it of its responsibilities; a stringent outward rule might not in the least assist it in ascertaining the limits of its responsibilities. One solemnly divorced, in our sense of the word, is declared to be not merely put away by her husband, but to be no longer his wife in the sight of God. The cases are not parallel; still less can the text, which does not condemn the Mosaic Law, pronounce what a future legislator ought or ought not to permit to men’s hardness of heart. But whatever the law be, the man stands at Christ’s tribunal, and must ask Him to search his heart, and tell him what he should do or should not do. If we suppose our Lord, in this text or any other, to have set aside the Mosaic code, and to have substituted a new code for Christendom, we empty the words of all their life, of all the power they have exercised over mankind.
For these words—these few simple words—have exercised a mighty power over mankind, just because they are not corrective of an outward policy, but belong to that internal regeneration which the Son of Man came to effect for the world.
As long as the man is debating with himself what chance he has of escaping from the marriage bond into which he has entered, so long it is impossible that he can regard it with any real reverence; it is not in any true sense a relation, it is merely a contract secured by certain penalties. If there has been any more elevated idea of wedlock in Christendom—in England—than this (and if there had not been, there would not have been a Christendom or an England at all; each would have had the semblance but not the substance of a social life), it has been because Christ took marriage out of the narrow sphere of general legislation, restored its elder sanctity, invested it with a deeper sanctity by revealing His Own relation with humanity, which sustains it, and which it sets forth. The Gospel of Marriage has done what laws respecting marriage never have done, never can do.
And so He has given the modern legislator a help in compassing his own truest ends, which the elder legislator did not possess. Moses was not merely obliged—obliged by duty and conscience—to tolerate divorces, he was also obliged to tolerate polygamy. He would have been stepping out of his place, he would have forgotten that he was a servant in the house, if he had made any endeavour to stop it, great as the temptation must often have been. He would have anticipated a stage in the world’s education; he would have tried to do that by laws, which, we have the clearest demonstrations of experience, has never been effected by laws,—has always been effected gradually, if not at once, wherever the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Son of Man, the One Head of the race, has been preached and accepted. Explain the fact as you like, that is the fact. Laws and punishments have never been able to undermine that which we feel to be so fatal to domestic peace, to the strength of a nation; with this proclamation it never can long coexist. Then the legislator is able to move in the wake of a moral power which has gone before him; he can say, “This shall not be; this is a violation of a primary institute of Society, which I will avenge;” then, and not till then, he will be listened to. And in the other case the difference is not less conspicuous. The modern legislator can take from the man all license of putting away his wife at his own pleasure. He can guarantee her rights. He can watch over her. He can claim that she shall only be divorced (not dismissed) after the solemnest proof that the contract has been violated. So mighty has been the change—produced wholly by an invisible moral force—that we scarcely know how to give the old word its proper signification. We unawares mix with it thoughts of formality and legality, which would have been alien from it in the conception of an old Jew or Roman, formalists and legalists though they both of them were.
The history of Christendom, in every period of it, bears out the conclusion which we should deduce from this one fact. Intelligent and impartial Protestant historians, who are not content with referring all the power which the Popes exerted in the Middle Ages to the superstition or wickedness of those ages, —who believe that no such power could have existed in God’s world if there had not been something in the conscience of mankind which upheld it,—have asked themselves, or rather have asked the records of the past to tell them, what it was in this power which could exalt itself above the decrees of States and the force of armies? And they have been compelled to answer: “Those who were called Fathers of the Church did set forth an image, if it were ever so distorted an image, of a Fatherly Government to men. They did address themselves to that sense of the dignity, the awfulness of relationships which there is in the minds of men. They did vindicate these as more ancient and divine, more connected with God and His dominion, than all the statutes of special kingdoms. And so, whenever they interfered to check the pride and license of monarchs, especially in reference to their marriages and the dissolution of them, there was that in the heart of Europe which defended and sustained the assumption, —which confessed it as the discovery of a higher tribunal, to redress crimes which lay beyond the control of ordinary judges,—as a voice proclaiming that the deeds done in darkness should be brought into the light of the sun.”
Here was the power of these rulers. Where was their weakness? How was it that they convinced men that this power must be lodged somewhere else than with them, that they could not wield it except to the injury of that very cause which had made it tolerable, which had made it venerable? They aspired not to assert that great ordinance which was from the beginning, not to stamp each marriage with the sanction of the Church, as a sign and witness of the sacredness which it bears in the eyes of God, but to give it an artificial sanctity by their blessing, it being in itself so earthly and impure that holy men ought not to stain themselves with it, even when it had received that blessing. They pretended to make it a Sacrament; they denied that God had made it sacramental by His act and institution. Marriage belonged to a scheme of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, not to a Divine economy. It was degraded from the high honour which God had put upon it, in order that it might be lifted again to a fictitious honour which it derived from the words of men. See whether the grossest scandals of the Middle Ages, the tricks and subterfuges by which marriages were declared to be void because they were not voidable, the deeper confusions which accompanied the clerical celibacy, had not their origin in this confusion of the Church respecting its own duties and powers. See whether its attempts to produce a rival system of jurisprudence to that of States and Civil Courts, did not arise from a secret distrust of its own power, a secret unbelief that domestic relationships were really holy in the sight of God, and had a foundation in His revelation of Himself. Precisely that Pharisaic habit of mind, which our Lord had encountered in the Sermon on the Mount, reproduced itself in His Church. Nothing was venerable and great but edicts. The New Testament meant a canon law. That canon law was to take special charge of those conjugal ties of which the ecclesiastic himself knew nothing, which it was his profession and vocation to scorn.
At length the Teutonic mind of Europe—that mind into which God had put from the first such a reverence for domestic life—declared that this could not be, that there must be a lie at the root of such tremendous practical contradictions. As men read the Old Testament, and found what clear pictures of domestic as well as of national life are there, they became convinced that God had intended both for men. They were certain that the Old Testament could not be contrary to the New, that Apostles had not designed to set at naught Lawgivers and Prophets. It was the fault of the ecclesiastics if this lay insurrection on behalf of morality and of God’s Word took too much of an Old Testament direction. It was their fault if in some countries which partook of the blessings of the Reformation, many of the imperfect notions of the Old Testament respecting marriage were substituted for the gross and heathenish perversions of the New, which had prevailed in the Latin nations. We may rejoice, though with trembling, if we escaped that danger, if we were able to vindicate the suitableness of marriage to all classes, and not to let in the license of divorce. But to whatever causes we owe this blessing, I do not think there is any evidence whatever to show that we owe it to the existence of a double jurisdiction among us, to our ecclesiastical law or ecclesiastical courts. These, it seems to me, have kept up the feeling in our people, that there is something fictitious in the sacredness of marriage, that it is connected with a certain technical and intricate procedure. It is a relic of that system which has destroyed the universality of the Church, which has destroyed the humanity of the Church, which has destroyed the divinity of the Church, by introducing a father on earth between the Father in Heaven and His children—which has substituted symbols of communion for actual communion, transubstantiated elements for living sacraments. Ecclesiastical Courts give a quasi-sacredness to an institution which we should hold to be essentially sacred, the appearance of an indissoluble union for the truth conveyed in the simple words, “God hath joined them together.” So far from admitting that the existence of such fictions contributes to the strength of our domestic or of our Christian life, I hold that we ought to sing songs of triumph at their disappearance; because there is evidence that they are blinding the minds of our people generally—nay, even the minds of wise and holy men—to the divinity of marriage, and are making them impatient of Christ’s own words, if they do not give out the sense which they wish to find in them.
I alluded last Sunday to signs of this impatience in quarters where one would the least look for them. In order to maintain the absolute indissolubility of marriage, it has been found necessary to explain away the limitation in the text. For this end, the strangest, I will venture to say, the most fatal experiments have been resorted to. The word πορνεία has been declared to be a technical word. The passages in the Prophets which speak of idolatries as fornications and adulteries, have been quoted to prove that this religious sense of the word is the most appropriate for our Lord’s purpose. Heresy, it is intimated, may be the New Testament substitute for idolatry. That, we are left to infer, if we are not directly told, might indeed be a ground for the dissolution of marriage. I do not want another proof to what lengths men may be driven when a theory is at stake, or how much the ecclesiastical theory about marriage may undermine the whole teaching of Scripture respecting it, as well as its actual stability. That language of the Prophets, as I have endeavoured to show you, so far from being technical language, is precisely the natural, simple, human language, in which God reveals His Own relations to men, by which He establishes our relationships to each other. If that is technical phraseology, everything in the Bible is technical. And when we have been brought to believe that it is so,—when we have turned the Scriptures into a great storehouse of fictions,—what has been gained for the argument? Marriage is not more indissoluble than it was before; only, instead of the dissolution taking place on a moral ground,—because the essence of the relation has been destroyed by one of the parties to it,—every husband who suspects his wife of some dangerous opinion may for that reason ask for a bill of divorcement, and put her away. Under such a system, what domestic intercourse would be possible? what domestic suspicion, tyranny, hypocrisy, would be impossible?
I do not oppose maxims like these by speaking of marriage as an earthly institution, a civil contract. I oppose them by the words of Christ, which they seek to explain away. I oppose them by associating marriage with His revelation of Himself. There is indeed an ambiguity about the phrase “civil contract,” which it is desirable to remove. Some merely understand by it, that marriage may be completely valid in the eye of man and of God, though performed without an ecclesiastical benediction. From their opinion I do not in the least dissent. The legislative measure of twenty years ago, which authorized English marriages by a civil officer, was, I think, a wise and godly measure. Men had been compelled to use holy words to which they attached little meaning and no faith, if they entered into wedlock at all. They were relieved from that terrible temptation. Those who could use those words, were likely to prize them more, because they did not regard them as necessary formalities, but as witnesses of the sacredness of the ordinance, as preparations for rightly fulfilling their vows. Greater clearness of apprehension respecting the nature of marriage, greater reverence for it, appears to have been the effect of this change. But why? Because it has forced us to reflect, that marriage does not derive its worth from the authority of God’s servants, civil and ecclesiastical; that one or other of them may repeat, but neither of them can do more than repeat, His own words: “These twain are one flesh; let not man put them asunder.”
Our experience of this measure should, I think, have made us cautious before we assume that the more recent one respecting divorce has a tendency to put those asunder whom God has joined together is likely to make divorce regarded with less aversion by our people. So long as it was looked upon as the privilege of a class, the horror of it which is part of our national mind, must have been weakened. A measure which takes away that prestige from it; which treats it, not as a boon which wealth may procure, but as the solemn announcement that the bond has been broken by a crime; which lessens the chance of the vile incidents of that crime being brought forth in courts amidst jests and ribaldry, and paraded in newspapers before the eyes of the public; which at the same time removes the determination of the cases in which separation shall be necessary, to tribunals which shall decide with simple gravity, according to the ordinary maxims of English justice, not according to subtleties of the canon law—may, we would hope, be conducive to the interests of English morality. To prevent statesmen from exercising the most serious judgment as to what will conduce to these interests, by alleging that the words of Scripture have peremptorily settled the question, is, it seems to me, to do a positive wrong; to make the legislator less aware of his solemn responsibilities to God; to misrepresent the character and object of our Lord’s teaching. In that teaching, as I have endeavoured to show you, there is the most accurate distinction, the most lively contrast, between that which he can do who makes rules for the hardness of men’s hearts, who imposes penalties on transgression, and that which the Lord of the heart Himself can do, when it submits itself to His guidance. To confuse these provinces together, is to destroy both. To demand that of outward legislation which Christ demands of the man himself, is to make the law a presumptuous despot, and the man a helpless slave. Out of such experiments have proceeded all those perplexities about what is called the alliance of Church and State, which disturb our hearts and our conduct equally. That alliance is either a dishonest compact between two enemies, uneasy while it lasts, doomed to perish like everything that is insincere; or it is a relation implied in the nature of things, in God’s eternal order, which cannot be annulled, but which may be disturbed and made abortive by the ambition of either party, by the feeling that each has an interest apart from the other, by the belief that self-interest and mutual fear are the bonds which hold them together, and the refusal to believe that they both exist to serve God’s purposes for the good of mankind. When the churchman thinks it is his chief business to watch the statesman, lest he should rob him of some of his privileges or his powers; when the statesman looks upon the churchman as a person whom he must tolerate, because he does certain jobs which, in the present condition of society, are indispensable, but who is only safe when he confesses himself a hireling, and acts on his confession; how much is the country cheated of the blessing to which it is entitled from both! For the churchman who fancies that the statesman can take his power from him, is surely forgetting what his power is, and Who has entrusted him with it. The statesman who wishes the churchman to account himself a hireling, has surely not understood that the only services he can render to the State are the services of a free man. If his job is to teach men how they may be righteous and honest, you do not surely prepare him for it by requiring him to be unrighteous and dishonest. By these mean jealousies, these petty struggles for precedence, what might be brave and noble proclamations of the glories and powers of the Church, are debased; what might be just and useful legislation, is marred. Good and wise teachers make us dread dangers from State encroachments more than from our own pride and selfishness. Parliaments indulge in petty revenge for the opposition of the clergy, by first forcing them to use services, which the law has itself made unnecessary, in cases where some of them feel that they cannot use them without profanation and a sin against God; and then, when this point has been ungraciously yielded to a pressure from without, by clogging the concession with terms which must produce endless heart-burnings, if any man in Orders so far forgets the obligations of a Christian gentleman as to accept the right of intruding himself into the Church of a protesting brother. These are signs of a temper which nothing perhaps but such judgments as God is now appointing for us can cure. May these judgments be effectual! May we not need other calamities more tremendous still, to teach us reverence for each other’s consciences, reverence for Him, Who is the Lord of the conscience, who has given to each his work, and would have none slight his own work or scorn the work of another! May we be taught by terrors and by mercies the sacredness of those bonds by which God has united us to each other, the sacredness of that still more awful and mysterious bond by which He has united us to Himself!