en
human beings, that failed to produce or promote human happiness, could
not, in the nature of things, be of any force or authority; and it
would be not only a right, but a duty, to abolish it.

4. _Resolved_, That though marriage be in itself divinely founded, and
is fortified as an institution by innumerable analogies in the whole
kingdom of universal nature, still, a true marriage is only known by
its results; and, like the fountain, if pure, will reveal only pure
manifestations. Nor need it ever be said, "What God hath joined
together, let no man put asunder," for man could not put it asunder;
nor can he any more unite what God and nature have not joined
together.

5. _Resolved_, That of all insulting mockeries of heavenly truth and
holy law, none can be greater than that physical impotency is cause
sufficient for divorce, while no amount of mental or moral or
spiritual imbecility is ever to be pleaded in support of such a
demand.

6. _Resolved_, That such a law was worthy those dark periods when
marriage was held by the greatest doctors and priests of the Church to
be a work of the flesh only, and almost, if not altogether, a
defilement; denied wholly to the clergy, and a second time, forbidden
to all.

7. _Resolved_, That an unfortunate or ill-assorted marriage is ever a
calamity, but not ever, perhaps never, a crime--and when society or
government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always to
the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of
both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man, nor exercised by
God himself.

8. _Resolved_, That observation and experience daily show how
incompetent are men, as individuals, or as governments, to select
partners in business, teachers for their children, ministers of their
religion, or makers, adjudicators, or administrators of their laws;
and as the same weakness and blindness must attend in the selection of
matrimonial partners, the dictates of humanity and common sense alike
show that the latter and most important contract should no more be
perpetual than either or all of the former.

9. _Resolved_, That children born in these unhappy and unhallowed
connections are, in the most solemn sense, of unlawful birth--the
fruit of lust, but not of love--and so not of God, divinely descended,
but from beneath, whence proceed all manner of evil and uncleanliness.

10. _Resolved_, That next to the calamity of such a birth to the
chil