The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating MatrimonyTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating Matrimony
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Marriage
Standing as you do between the generation that is past and the
generation that is to come, are you going to pass the blessing on, or
are you going to have your life the gulf in which that tide of
blessing shall drop out of sight forever? You are
THE TRUSTEE OF PIETY
in that ancestral line, and are you going to augment or squander that
solemn trust fund? are you going to disinherit your sons and daughters
of the heirloom which your parents left you? Ah! that cannot be
possible, that cannot be possible that you are going to take such a
position as that. You are very careful about the life insurances, and
careful about the deeds, and careful about the mortgages, and careful
about the title of your property, because when you step off the stage
you want your children to get it all. Are you making no provision that
they shall get grandfather and grandmother's religion? Oh, what a last
will and testament you are making, my brother! "In the name of God,
Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I
bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I
own; but I disinherit them, I rob them of the ancestral grace and the
Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own
worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the
everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of
God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth
and heaven and hell, March, 1886."
O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up this morning to a sense of
your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be
AN OLD CRADLE,
or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of
midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair
in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is
the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that
awful night when there were but three of you awake--you and God and
mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an old
family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you, saying: "My son,
my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us
all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and
dying? By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our
dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our
spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year."
Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of
New York who attended a prayer-meeting one night and asked for
prayer, and then went home and wrote down these words:
AN ENTRY IN A DIARY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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