piety insulted, without any appeal, but to conscience and to heaven. A thousand methods of torture may be invented, a thousand acts of unkindness, or disregard, may be committed, a thousand innocent gratifications may be denied, and a thousand hardships imposed, without any violation of national laws. Life may be imbittered with hourly vexation; and weeks, months, and years, be lingered out in misery, without any legal cause of separation, or possibility of judicial redress. Perhaps no sharper anguish is felt, than that which cannot be complained of, nor any greater cruelties inflicted, than some which no human authority can relieve.
That marriage itself, an institution designed only for the promotion of happiness, and for the relief of the disappointments, anxieties, and distresses, to which we are subject in our present state, does not always produce the effects for which it was appointed; that it sometimes condenses the gloom, which it was intended to dispel, and increases the weight, which was expected to be made lighter by it, must, however unwillingly, be yet acknowledged.
It is to be considered to what causes, effects so unexpected and unpleasing, so contrary to the end of the institution, and so unlikely to arise from it, are to be attributed; it is necessary to inquire, whether those that are thus unhappy are to impute their misery to any other cause than their own folly, and to the neglect of those duties, which prudence and religion equally require.
This inquiry may not only be of use in stating and explaining the duties of the marriage-state, but may contribute to free it from licentious misrepresentations and weak objections; which, indeed, can have little force upon minds not already adapted to receive impressions from them by habits of debauchery; but which, when they cooperate with lewdness, intemperance, and vanity; when they are proposed to an understanding naturally weak, and made yet weaker, by luxury and sloth, by an implicit resignation to reigning follies, and an habitual compliance
