We enter the world of humanity, which is the realm of morality, through the family. Here we open our eyes to the light, and here we have the first intimations of truth, which is provision for the intellect, and of righteousness, which is provision for the will. The truth of the family is the sum of the relations which subsist among the members of it. The family consists, we will say, of father and mother, and children. Here is a man and a woman, then, bound together by the relation of marriage. The children are related to the parents as offspring. The children are related to one another as brothers and sisters. Altogether they are one and they are many. There is unity and there is difference. In the relations implied in the names husband and wife, father and mother, parents and children, brothers and sisters, we have the truth of the family. We know the family and can only know the family through these relations. Take the relations away, and you take the family away. There cannot be a husband without a wife, a father without a mother, parents without children, and children without a father and a mother. Abiding in these relations, which make up the truth of the family, wrapt up with them and growing out of them, are the laws of right which the will is to obey. The relation of marriage is accompanied by certain obligations and duties which husband and wife are to observe. These obligations and duties are divine laws, because marriage is a divine relation. The relations involved in the term parents, are attended by certain necessary laws the father and the mother are to observe with reference to children. The names of child, brother, sister, imply relations that in turn imply laws the child is to follow with reference to parents, and brothers and sisters are to regard with reference to one another. These laws, which grow out of the relations which constitute the family, are not arbitrary, artificial, or accidental. They have not been formed by the opinions of men, nor formulated in the legislative assemblies of men. Legislative bodies have, perhaps, confirmed them and reproduced them in statutes, but this was not to create, but to transcribe what was already present. The laws with reference to which the members of a family find themselves placed are as essential and constitutional as the laws governing natural objects, which we define when we say bodies attract each other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance. These are subtle and invisible principles which cannot be read out of rocks and logs and moons and suns. Displace rocks and logs and suns and moons, and the apparent power of these laws would not be seen, but upon the appearance of the natural objects, they would be immediately grasped and dominated by the power of the laws.