Evangelist Speaks On Marriage To 5000

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31923, 26 February 1969, Page 18

Evangelist Speaks On Marriage To 5000

The American evangelist, the Rev. Lane Adams, made a public confession at Lancaster Park last evening of the early failure of his own marriage, outlined how he saved is from disaster then asked 5000 people to commit their marriages or intended marriages to Christ.

Such a committal was the formula for a successful marriage, he said.

Mr Adams, an associate of Dr Billy Graham, made an impassioned plea individually to husbands, wives and children to obey the dictates of Christ as contained in the Epistles of St Paul as the guarantee of happiness in life. He spoke of marriage as the essential element in a moral society. He said that divorce rates had reached 65 per cent of all marriages in Wilmington, North Carolina, and two out of five for the whole of the United States. Mr Adams denied that divorce was the answer to an unhappy marriage. “Divorce leaves people with terrible emotional scars and a terrible sense of guilt,” he said. He said he knew what it was to feel that every vestige of marital love had been destroyed. It had taken years for his own marriage to reach success and that he attributed to Christ

“This is not to say that our’s is an ideal marriage. It could be said that one of the parties to a marriage where there had not been a quarrel in 40 years was unnecessary,” he said. Mr Adams said most broken marirages related to people who mistook love for lust. Mr Adams said the biggest lie that the educational system had ever told was that men and women are so alike.

“Intellectually, emotionally, psychologically and constitutionally they are so unalike. Basically women go at life heart first For women love is life itself,” he said. “A woman plays around with sex to get love but a man will play around with love to get sex.”

Mr Adams deplored those husbands who left the education and instruction of children to their wives. “Any father in the house is less than a man who says, T let her take care of that’.” Mr Adams said the break-

down of authority among children as the outcome of lack of parental control. “It is well known in the United States that the anarchists are those who never learned to submit to authority. Assaults on the police are the desperate desire for a father image, for restriction.”

Mr Adams reviled the despicable habit of some husbands of ridiculing their wives publicly for their shortcomings. Rather, he said, they should hold their wives up in the best possible light “Love covers a multitude of sins,” he said.