Note 35 — AIDS TO REFLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF A MANLY CHARACTER, ON THE SEVERAL GROUNDS OF PRUDENCE, MORALITY, AND RELIGION. (continued 2)

This paragraph is abridged from the Watchman, No. IV. March 25 1796; respecting which the inquisitive Reader may consult my 'Literary Life.'—Author's note in editions 1 (1825) and 1836, since suppressed.—ed.

[36] Coleridge's 'Reflections On Having Left a Place of Retirement,' l. 48, &c. ('Sibylline Leaves,' 1797).—Ed.

[37] There sometimes occurs an apparent play on words, which not only to the Moralizer, but even to the philosophical Etymologist, appears more than a mere Play. Thus in the double sense of the word, become. I have known persons so anxious to have their dress become them, as to convert it at length into their proper self, and thus actually to become the dress. Such a one, (safeliest spoken of by the neuter pronoun), I consider as but a suit of live finery. It is indifferent whether we say—It becomes he, or, he becomes it.

[38] It might be a mean of preventing many unhappy marriages, if the youth of both sexes had it early impressed on their minds, that Marriage contracted between Christians is a true and perfect Symbol or Mystery; that is, the actualizing Faith being supposed to exist in the Receivers, it is an outward Sign co-essential with that which it signifies, or a living Part of that, the whole of which it represents. Marriage, therefore, in the Christian sense (Ephesians v. 22-33), as symbolical of the union of the Soul with Christ the Mediator, and with God through Christ, is perfectly a sacramental ordinance, and not retained by the Reformed Churches as one of the Sacraments, for two reasons; first, that the Sign is not distinctive of the Church of Christ, and the Ordinance not peculiar nor owing its origin to the Gospel Dispensation; secondly, it is not of universal obligation, not a means of Grace enjoined on all Christians. In other and plainer words, Marriage does not contain in itself an open Profession of Christ, and it is not a Sacrament of the Church, but only of certain Individual Members of the Church. It is evident, however, that neither of these reasons affect or diminish the religious nature and dedicative force of the marriage Vow, or detract from the solemnity in the Apostolic Declaration: This is a great Mystery.

The interest which the state has in the appropriation of one woman to one man, and the civil obligations therefrom resulting, form an altogether distinct consideration. When I meditate on the words of the Apostle, confirmed and illustrated as they are, by so many harmonies in the Spiritual Structure of our proper Humanity, (in the image of God, male and female created he the man), and then reflect how little claim so large a number of legal cohabitations have to the name of Christian marriages—I feel inclined to doubt whether the plan of celebrating marriages universally by the Civil Magistrate, in the first instance, and leaving the religious Covenant and sacramental Pledge to the election of the parties themselves, adopted during the Republic in England, and in our own times by the French Legislature, was not in fact, whatever it might be in intention, reverential to Christianity. At all events, it was their own act and choice, if the parties made bad worse by the profanation of a Gospel Mystery.