Marriage and The Marriage Institution
Paper 33 – Administration of the Local Universe
33:3:6 (369.1) This is, in deed and in truth, the high ideal of the family and the human institution of voluntary marriage.
Paper 38 – Ministering Spirits of the Local Universe
38:2:2 (419.2) They are much as you will be on the mansion worlds, where you will “neither marry nor be given in marriage but will be as the angels of heaven.” For all who “shall be accounted worthy to attain the mansion worlds neither marry nor are given in marriage; neither do they die any more, for they are equal to the angels.”
Paper 68 – The Dawn of Civilization
68:2:9 (765.6) The function of marriage in evolution is the insurance of race survival, not merely the realization of personal happiness; self-maintenance and self-perpetuation are the real objects of the home. … Nature demands survival, but the arts of civilization continue to increase the pleasures of marriage and the satisfactions of family life.
Paper 70 – The Evolution of Human Government
70:5:1 (788.13) Every human institution had a beginning, and civil government is a product of progressive evolution just as much as are marriage, industry, and religion.
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:0:1 (913.1) Marriage—mating—grows out of bisexuality. … Marriage has given mankind the home, and the home is the crowning glory of the whole long and arduous evolutionary struggle.
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:1:1 (913.4) Mating is an innate propensity, and marriage is its evolutionary social repercussion.
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:1:3 (913.6) The regulation of sex in relation to marriage indicates:
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:1:8 (914.4) As an institution, marriage, from its early beginnings down to modern times, pictures the social evolution of the biologic propensity for self-perpetuation.
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:2:1 (914.7) The story of the evolution of marriage is simply the history of sex control through the pressure of social, religious, and civil restrictions.
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:3:14 (917.2) Many primitive tribes sanctioned trial marriage until the woman became pregnant, when the regular marriage ceremony would be performed; among other groups the wedding was not celebrated until the first child was born. If a wife was barren, she had to be redeemed by her parents, and the marriage was annulled.
Paper 82 – The Evolution of Marriage
82:3:15 (917.3) When modern couples marry with the thought of convenient divorce in the background of their minds if they are not wholly pleased with their married life, they are in reality entering upon a form of trial marriage and one that is far beneath the status of the honest adventures of their less civilized ancestors.Paper 101 – The Real Nature of Religion
101:7:1 (1113.7) Vocation, marriage, and kindred all influence the evolution of one’s personal standards of life.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:0:2 (922.2) marriage has been many times in jeopardy, and the Marriage mores have drawn heavily on both property and religion for support; but the real influence which forever safeguards Marriage and the resultant family is the simple and innate biologic fact that men and women positively will not live without each other, be they the most primitive savages or the most cultured mortals.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:1:1 (922.4) Marriage is society’s mechanism designed to regulate and control those many human relations which arise out of the physical fact of bisexuality. As such an institution, Marriage functions in two directions:
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:1:4 (922.7) The family, which grows out of marriage, is itself a stabilizer of the marriage institution together with the property mores. … marriage is an institution of society, not a department of the church.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:1:5 (922.8) Primitive marriage was primarily industrial; and even in modern times it is often a social or business affair. Through the influence of the mixture of the Andite stock and as a result of the mores of advancing civilization, marriage is slowly becoming mutual, romantic, parental, poetical, affectionate, ethical, and even idealistic.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:4:1 (924.4) The wedding ceremony grew out of the fact that marriage was originally a community affair, not just the culmination of a decision of two individuals.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:4:9 (925.5) The luck element, that in spite of all premarital tests certain marriages turned out bad, led primitive man to seek insurance protection against marriage failure; led him to go in quest of priests and magic. … But for a long time marriage was generally recognized as consisting in the decisions of the contracting parents—later of the pair—while for the last five hundred years church and state have assumed jurisdiction and now presume to make pronouncements of marriage.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:5:2 (925.7) The next step in mating evolution was the group marriage. … All over the world the looser forms of communal marriage gradually evolved into various types of group marriage.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:5:4 (926.2) This was a relic of the time when marriage was a family affair rather than an individual association.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:6:1 (927.2) Monogamy is monopoly; it is good for those who attain this desirable state, but it tends to work a biologic hardship on those who are not so fortunate.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:6:4 (927.5) While pursuing the monogamic goal of the ideal pair marriage, which is, after all, something of a monopolistic sex association, society must not overlook the unenviable situation of those unfortunate men and women who fail to find a place in this new and improved social order, even when having done their best to co-operate with, and enter into, its requirements.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:6:6 (927.7) This ideal of true pair marriage entails self-denial, and therefore does it so often fail just because one or both of the contracting parties are deficient in that acme of all human virtues, rugged self-control.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:6:8 (928.1) Pair marriage favors and fosters that intimate understanding and effective co-operation which is best for parental happiness, child welfare, and social efficiency. marriage, which began in crude coercion, is gradually evolving into a magnificent institution of self-culture, self-control, self-expression, and self-perpetuation.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:7:1 (928.2) In the early evolution of the marital mores, marriage was a loose union which could be terminated at will, and the children always followed the mother; the mother-child bond is instinctive and has functioned regardless of the developmental stage of the mores.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:7:3 (928.4) As the mores evolved, certain tribes developed two forms of marriage: the ordinary, which permitted divorce, and the priest marriage, which did not allow for separation. The inauguration of wife purchase and wife dowry, by introducing a property penalty for marriage failure, did much to lessen separation.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:7:4 (928.5) The social pressure of community standing and property privileges has always been potent in the maintenance of the marriage taboos and mores. … While these upheavals of adjustment appear among the more progressive races as a result of suddenly accelerated social evolution, among the less advanced peoples marriage continues to thrive and slowly improve under the guidance of the older mores.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:7:5 (928.6) The new and sudden substitution of the more ideal but extremely individualistic love motive in marriage for the older and long-established property motive, has unavoidably caused the marriage institution to become temporarily unstable. Man’s marriage motives have always far transcended actual marriage morals, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Occidental ideal of marriage has suddenly far outrun the self-centered and but partially controlled sex impulses of the races.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:7:6 (928.7) The real test of marriage, all down through the ages, has been that continuous intimacy which is inescapable in all family life. Two pampered and spoiled youths, educated to expect every indulgence and full gratification of vanity and ego, can hardly hope to make a great success of marriage and home building—a lifelong partnership of self-effacement, compromise, devotion, and unselfish dedication to child culture.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:7:8 (929.2) But just so long as society fails to properly educate children and youths, so long as the social order fails to provide adequate premarital training, and so long as unwise and immature youthful idealism is to be the arbiter of the entrance upon marriage, just so long will divorce remain prevalent. And in so far as the social group falls short of providing marriage preparation for youths, to that extent must divorce function as the social safety valve which prevents still worse situations during the ages of the rapid growth of the evolving mores.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:1 (929.4) Marriage which culminates in the home is indeed man’s most exalted institution, but it is essentially human; it should never have been called a sacrament. The Sethite priests made Marriage a religious ritual; but for thousands of years after Eden, mating continued as a purely social and civil institution.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:2 (929.5) The union of husband and wife in the marriage-home relationship is a material function of the mortals of the evolutionary worlds. True, indeed, much spiritual progress may accrue consequent upon the sincere human efforts of husband and wife to progress, but this does not mean that marriage is necessarily sacred.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:3 (929.6) Neither can marriage be truly compared to the relation of the Adjuster to man nor to the fraternity of Christ Michael and his human brethren. … And it is most unfortunate that the human misconception of these relationships has produced so much confusion as to the status of marriage.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:4 (929.7) It is also unfortunate that certain groups of mortals have conceived of marriage as being consummated by divine action. … But the very fact of marriage dissolution itself indicates that Deity is not a conjoining party to such unions.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:5 (930.1) Nevertheless, there is an ideal of marriage on the spheres on high. … After all, the ideal mortal marriage is humanly sacred.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:6 (930.2) marriage always has been and still is man’s supreme dream of temporal ideality. … But young men and women should be taught something of the realities of Marriage before they are plunged into the exacting demands of the interassociations of family life; youthful idealization should be tempered with some degree of premarital disillusionment.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:7 (930.3) The youthful idealization of marriage should not, however, be discouraged; such dreams are the visualization of the future goal of family life. This attitude is both stimulating and helpful providing it does not produce an insensitivity to the realization of the practical and commonplace requirements of marriage and subsequent family life.
Paper 83 – The Marriage Institution
83:8:8 (930.4) The ideals of marriage have made great progress in recent times; among some peoples woman enjoys practically equal rights with her consort. … But even this newer version of marriage need not presume to swing so far to the extreme as to confer mutual monopoly of all personality and individuality.
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