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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, March 3, 1868

FromReview and Herald, Vol. XXXI, No. 12

The Conspiracy Against Marriage.

WHEN evils of the nature set forth below become so outbreaking as to attract the attention and excite the comments of such a paper as the N. Y. Tribune, from which we clip the following paragraphs, we may be sure that they prevail to an alarming extent. Who can look at these things and not be mindful of the words of our Lord: As it was in the days of Lot, thus shall it be in the days when the Son of man is revealed. The Tribune says:—

We attach little importance to random rumors, but we must be very incredulous indeed if all we have heard and read did not make us suspect that in our modern society causes were at work, hostile both in form and substance to the institution of marriage. We call it a conspiracy, for it is a conspiracy of influences, if not of persons, not conscious and purposed, perhaps, but none the less settled and active.

We know not how it may be in England, but in France, and in our own country, there has been remarked a very significant and alarming diminution in the size of families. Marriages are less productive than they used to be; at least, such is the general and the probably well-founded impression. There is no decrease in the marriage rate of France; on the contrary, it is stated that throughout the empire there is a constant and considerable rise in the marriage rate. But the population of the empire does not augment. It falls off, rather, by some scores of thousands a year.

The last mentioned sign of conspiracy is accompanied closely by another sign of appalling magnitude and prominence, the significance of which cannot be concealed or mistaken; and that is the enormous number of children born out of wedlock, in every modern community. The figures here are terrible—too terrible to put down. Every child so born affronts the institution of marriage. The tens of thousands that are so born annually in every “civilized” country, in some places outnumbering the legitimate births, are an evidence that, for some reason or other, marriage is not held in honor as it should be. This fearful phenomenon means unlawful gratification of passion; passion unregulated by reason or principle, unsanctioned by morality or religion, vicious and degrading. It means waste of masculine vigor and feminine beauty, the decay of productiveness, and the weakening of social bonds. It means neglect of children, who are thrown uncared for upon the world to supply the ranks of the perishing and the dangerous classes. It means suffering, pauperism, and crime. It means the practice of abortion by vile persons who make it their infernal business to kill offspring in the womb by practices deadly not only to the embryo life, but to the constitution that engenders it. It means houses like that to which public attention has been lately called in this city, where babies are sent to be “taken care of until they die.” It means infanticide—the slaughter of infants for whom no one chooses to become responsible. It means the systematic drying up of the sources of life, physical and social. There is an army, large, appointed, organized, commissioned, waging ceaseless war against the marriage institution.