causes of the union of husbands and wives.

But George Fox, as he introduced these and other salutary regulations on
the subject of Marriage, so he introduced a new manner of the
celebration of it. He protested against the manner of the world, that
is, against the formal prayers and exhortations as they were repeated,
and against the formal ceremonies, an they were practised by the Parish
Priest. He considered that it was God, who joined man and woman before
the fall; and that in Christian times, or where the man was truly
renovated in heart, there could be no other right or honourable way of
union. Consistently with this view of the subject, he observed, that in
the ancient scriptural times, persons took each other in marriage in the
assemblies of the Elders; and there was no record, from the Book of
Genesis to that of Revelations, of any marriage by a Priest. Hence it
became his new society, as a religious or renovated people, to abandon
apostate usages, and to adopt a manner that was more agreeable to their
new state.

George Fox gave in his own marriage, an example of all that he had thus
recommended to the society. Having agreed with Margaret Fell, the widow
of Judge Fell, upon the propriety of their union as husband and wife,
he desired her to send for her children. As soon as they were come, he
asked them and their respective husbands,[1] "If they had any thing
against it, or for it, desiring them to speak? and they all severally
expressed their _satisfaction therein_. Then he asked Margaret, if she
had fulfilled and performed her husband's Will to her children? She
replied, the _children know that_. Whereupon he asked them, whether, if
their mother married, they should not lose by it? And he asked Margaret,
whether she had done any thing in lieu of it, which might answer it to
the children? The children said, _she had answered it to them_, and