Marriage is more than your
love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy
ordinance, through which He wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of
time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage
you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to
pass away to His glory, and calls into His kingdom.
In your love, you see only
the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of
responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private
possession, but marriage is more than something personal -- it is a status, an
office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes
the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that
joins you together in the sight of God and man.
As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity,
the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the
promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now
on, the marriage that sustains your love.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer in "A Wedding Sermon from
Prison"
#3645
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