The Eternal Nature of the Family Relation

We cannot deny our own conviction, founded upon such considerations as we have been able to give to the subject, that the family relation, as it is recognized and established in the New Testament, has its  foundation in the nature of things, and is eternal. This, it will be perceived, is a very different doctrine from that which makes it a mere positive institution, founded upon arbitrary command. It will be conceded, I suppose, that God never mends his own work. His conceptions, founded upon, or rather involving, the fact of a knowledge and comparison of all possibilities of being and action, are always perfect. And, consequently, when we ascertain what his views and plans of things are, we ascertain that which is unchangeable.

The idea of the family, namely, of duality in unity, reproducing itself in a third, which combines the image of both, is entitled, if we are correct in what has been said, to be regarded as a plan or arrangement of things which God has adopted as the best possible to be carried out and realized. And if so, it bears the stamp of divine perpetuity, as well as of divine wisdom. 

What is Life?

The question naturally arises in the inquiring mind what Life is? In answering this question, it is admitted that we may not be able, in consequence of its ultimate and primary position, to say what life is, in itself considered: but it will aid much in giving clearness to our conceptions, if we proceed to give concisely but distinctly some of its marks or characteristics.

1.—One of the marks or characteristics of Life, in its primary or ultimate sense, in distinction from anything of a subordinate or secondary nature which may sometimes bear that name, is, that it is without beginning. If the Life, meaning by the term what may be conveniently designated as the true or essential Life, could not be said to exist without a beginning, then it would be true, that there was a time, (namely, the time antecedent to its beginning,) when it had no existence: a doctrine, which would leave the universe for unnumbered ages without any life-giving principle. It is hardly necessary to say that this is a view which is inadmissible. And besides, if there was a time when the Essential Life did not exist, and afterwards a time when it began to exist, then, inasmuch as not having existed at first it could not have created itself, it must have been brought into being by another Life antecedent to it in existence. And if there was another principle of Life antecedent to it in existence, which was without beginning and had also by means of its higher and broader nature the power of developing existence in other forms, then that antecedent life was, and is, the Essential Life. Therefore it is reasonable to say that one of the marks or characteristics of Life, in the true and higher sense of that term, is, that it is without beginning.