tie between
husband and wife is a sacred thing, to be broken at no temptation,
but in man?

These are THE feelings which man has alone of all living animals.

These then, remember, are the very family feelings which come out in
the story of Joseph. He honours holy wedlock when he tells his
master's wife, 'How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against
God?' He honours his father, when he is not ashamed of him, wild
shepherd out of the desert though he might be, and an abomination to
the Egyptians, while he himself is now in power and wealth and
glory, as a prince in a civilized country. He honours the tie of
brother to brother, by forgiving and weeping over the very brothers
who have sold him into slavery.

But what has all this to do with God?

Now man, as we know, is an animal with an immortal spirit in him.
He has, as St. Paul so carefully explains to us, a flesh and a
spirit--a flesh like the beasts which perish; a spirit which comes
from God.

Now the Bible teaches us that man did not get these family feelings
from his flesh, from the animal, brute part of him. They are not
carnal, but spiritual. He gets them from his spirit, and they are
inspired into him by the Spirit of God. They come not from the
earth below, but from the heaven above; from the image of God, in
which man alone of all living things was made.

For if it were not so, we should surely see some family feeling in
the beasts which are most like men. But we do not. In the apes,
which are, in their shape and fleshly nature, so strangely and
shockingly like human beings, there is not as much family feeling as
there is in many birds, or even insects. Nay, the wild negroes,
among whom they live, hold them in abhorrence, and believe that they
were once men like themselves, who were gradually changed into brute
beasts, by giving way to detestable sins; while these very negroes
themselves, heathens and savages as they are, HAVE the family
feeling--the feeling of husband for wife, father for child, brother
for brother; not, indeed, as strongly and purely as we, or at least
those of us who are really Christian and civilized, but still they
have it; and that makes between the lowest man and the highest brute
a difference which I hold is as wide as the space between heaven and
earth.

It is man alone, I say, who has the idea of family; and who has,
too, the strange, but most true belief that these family ties are
appointed by God--that th