The vulgar imagine God to be a king, who holds his seat of justice in his court. Tender hearts represent him as a father who takes care of his children. The sage attributes to Him no human affection. He acknowledges a necessary eternal power which animates all nature, and resigns himself to it.
It requires twenty years to raise man from the state of a plant, in which he abides in his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state, which is the lot of his earliest infancy, to that in which the maturity of reason begins to dawn. He has required thirty ages to become a little acquainted with his own bodily structure. He would require eternity to become acquainted with his soul. He requires but an instant to kill himself.
I once met with a reasoner who said: "Induce your subjects to marry as early as possible. Let them be exempt from taxes the first year; and let their portion be assessed on those who at the same age are in a state of celibacy.
"The more married men you have, the fewer crimes there will be. Examine the frightful columns of your criminal calendars; you will there find a hundred youths executed for one father of a family.
"Marriage renders men more virtuous and more wise. The father of a family is not willing to blush before his children; he is afraid to make shame their inheritance.
"Let your soldiers marry, and they will no longer desert. Bound to their families, they will be bound to their country. An unmarried soldier is frequently nothing but a vagabond, to whom it matters not whether he serves the king of Naples or the king of Morocco."
The Roman warriors were married: they fought for their wives and their children; and they made slaves of the wives and the children of other nations.
A great Italian politician, who was, besides, learned in the Eastern tongues, a thing rare among our politicians, said to me in my youth: "_Caro figlio,_" remember that the Jews never had but one good institution--that of abhorring virginity. If that little nation of superstitious jobbers had not regarded marriage as the first of the human obligations--if there had been among them convents of nuns--they would have been inevitably lost.
Marriage is a contract in the law of nations, of which the Roman Catholics have made a sacrament.