of life, though certainly misled by false notions of holiness, and perverted conceptions of the duties of our religion; have at least the merit of mistaken endeavours to promote virtue, and must be allowed to have reasoned at least with some degree of probability, in vindication of their conduct. They were generally persons of piety, and sometimes of knowledge, and are, therefore, not to be confounded with the fool, the drunkard, and the libertine. They who decline marriage, for the sake of a more severe and mortified life, are surely to be distinguished from those who condemn it as too rigorous a confinement, and wish the abolition of it in favour of boundless voluptuousness and licensed debauchery.
Perhaps even the errours of mistaken goodness may be rectified, and the prejudices surmounted by deliberate attention to the nature of the institution; and certainly the calumnies of wickedness may be, by the same means, confuted, though its clamours may not be silenced; since commonly, in debates like this, confutation and conviction are very distant from each other. For that nothing but vice or folly obstructs the happiness of a married life may be made evident by examining,
First: The nature and end of marriage.
Secondly: The means by which that end is to be attained.
First: The nature and end of marriage.
The vow of marriage which the wisdom of most civilized nations has enjoined, and which the rules of the Christian church enjoin, may be properly considered as a vow of perpetual and indissoluble friendship; friendship which no change of fortune, nor any alteration of external circumstances, can be allowed to interrupt or weaken. After the commencement of this state, there remain no longer any separate interests; the two individuals become united, and are, therefore, to enjoy the same felicity, and suffer the same misfortunes; to have the same friends and the same enemies, the same success and the same disappointments. It is easy, by pursuing the parallel between friendship and
