Untitled article by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 2, 1908

Contrasts and Counterfeits — No. 4

By C. M. S.

THERE is perhaps no institution of divine origin that Satan has sought more earnestly to counterfeit, disparage, contradict, and dishonor than he has the family institution—marriage. His warfare upon this sacred institution began while the first pair were still living, and he used a descendant of the fratricide Cain as his instrument.

Cain was the father of Enoch (not the Enoch who was translated), Enoch was the father of Irad, Irad was the father of Mehujael, Mehujael was the father of Methushael, and Methushael was the father of Lamech. Lamech was the first polygamist, so far as the record shows, the first man who set himself against the Creator's plan for the perpetuity of the race; and he was not only the descendant of a murderer, but he was a murderer himself. Concerning him we read: “And Lamech took unto him two wives. . . . And Lamech said unto his wives: . . . I have slain a man for wounding me, and a young man for bruising me: if Cain shall be avenged

sevenfold, truly Lamech, seventy and sevenfold.” Gen. 4:19-24.

The murderer reasoned thus: My provocation was greater than Cain’s, therefore my assurance of protection is greater. But from that descendant of a murderer, who was himself a murderer, the world has inherited the scourge of a system of conjugal relations as much opposed to the purposes of God for man as Cain’s hate and the fruit of his hate are opposed to God’s love and the fruit of that love.

This is not overdrawn. We read in the sixth chapter of Genesis, only a few generations later than the days of Lamech, that when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, “they took them wives of all that they chose;” and immediately the record states, “And Jehovah said, My Spirit shall not strive with man forever. . . . And Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented Jehovah that he had made man on the earth.” Gen. 6:3-6. Is there no connection between this abundant, overflowing wickedness of thought and act and the disruption of the divine plan for the family? The Word indicates that there is the closest connection between the two. More than that, it is shown by the analogies of history. Where the divine plan has been followed closest, there has been the least of the practises of moral degradation. Where the divine plan has been thrown aside and the plan of Lamech followed, the imagination has wrought with fierce endeavor to debase and ruin the morals of men and women. We can find the trace of that debasing propaganda in all portions of the earth; and expounders of the theory of evolution attempt to show, by the existence of various degrees of bestial practises in different parts of the world, that there has been an evolution of the marriage institution from a state of animal promiscuity up to the monogamy of to-day, through polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and marriage by capture and by barter; and the terrible conditions out of which the propounders of that theory drag the marriage institution are such as can not be told here. The imagination can picture nothing darker or more shamelessly debasing. Out of polyandry grew the murder of infant girls, a practise which has been kept up in certain lands long after polyandry gave way to monogamy. That murder and the debasing of the family institution should go hand in hand is not strange when we consider the history of Lamech, who instituted polygamy.

One writer on ethnography, who is a believer in evolution in general, and in the evolution of marriage in particular, says: “It is in animality that humanity has its root; it is there, consequently, that we must seek the origins of human sociology.” Reasoning from such an atheistic standpoint, his conclusion is natural that “our moral sentiments are simply habits incarnate in our brain, or instincts artificially created.”

That leaves out of the question entirely all authority in morals, and makes human instinct alone the director of our destinies, the judge of righteousness. It was because men in the time of Lamech and Noah had come to look upon the matter from that standpoint, or to act upon that premise, that the race sank into the unmentionable immoral conditions which the ethnographer has found. Paul found the same conditions, and gave a better reason for them. Instead of those conditions being a step upward from the unreasoning anthropoid ape toward the plane of the manhood of to-day, they were a long step downward and away from the purpose of God, showing the inevitable result of pandering to fleshly passion and trusting to human habits as a guide in moral sentiment. Paul says: “Because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. . . . Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness. . . . For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions. . . . And even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting.” Rom. 1:21-28.

This earth, through centuries, has reeked with the disgusting iniquities that have grown out of the example of Lamech, who, under the tutelage of Satan, opposed the plan of God with a counterfeit family institution. Every evil tendency has been accentuated by the influences growing out of that counterfeit institution, because of its power to weaken every moral fiber of the being. It was a deliberate attack upon the law of God, especially the seventh commandment, just as truly as Satan’s contradiction of God in Eden was an attack upon the truthfulness of the Lawgiver himself.

The plan of God was one man and one woman: “I will make him a helpmeet for him,” not several helps for the one man, as in polygamy, nor one help for several men, as in polyandry, nor a slave for him as in the concubinate and in the lowest forms of monogamy as now existing in many countries; but “an helpmeet for him.” So we read: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Gen. 2:24. Our Saviour, in calling to the mind of his hearers these words above quoted, makes them more specific. He says, “The two shall become one flesh.” Matt. 19:5.

Nothing could be plainer than these statements of Inspiration in reference to the marriage institution; and nothing could be more certain than that Satan has deliberately sought to pervert God’s purpose in this as in other things. In so far as he has succeeded, he has brought degradation, sorrow, misery, and dishonor, with the blasting of brightest hopes and the ruin of souls.

Some quote the example of the polygamous kings of Israel as justification for polygamy to-day. It is a sufficient answer that the Israelites demanded a king that they might be like the nations around them. They got the king, became like the nations around them, and their kings copied the customs of the kings of those nations. But “from the beginning it was not so;” and in the plan of God it had no part.

C. M. S.