Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1882 — Sweet Home. [ARTICLE]

Sweet Home.

When two young people love each other and marry, they restore the picture of the apostolic church. They are of one heart and soul. Neither do they say that anything they possess is their own, but they have all things in common. Their mutual trust in each other draws all that is best in both. Love is the angel who rolls the stone from the grave in which we bury our tetter nature, and it comes forth. Love makes all things new; makes all cares light, all pain easy. It is the one enchantment in human life which realizes Fortunio’s purse and Aladdin’s palace, and turns the “Arabian Ni- ht-s” into mere prose by comparison. Before real society can come, true homes must come. As in a sheltered nook in the midst of a great sea of ice which rolls.down the summit of Mount Blanc is found a little green spot full of tender flowers, so in the shelter of home, in the warm atmosphere of household love, spring up the pure affections of parent and child, father, mother, son, daughter; of brothers and sisters. Whatever makes this insecure and divorce frequent, makes of marriage, not a union for life, but an experimi nt which may be tried as often as we may choose, and abandoned when w r e like. And this cuts up by the roots all the dear affections of home; leaves children orphaned, destroys fatherly and motherly love, and is a virtual dissolution of society. I know the great difficulties of this question, and how much is required to solve them. But whatever weakens the permanence of marriage tends to dissolve so< iety; for permanent homes are to the social state what the little cells are to the body. They are the commencement of organic life, the centre from which, of necessity, all organization must proceed.