Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Spring 2022 issue of Eikon.
A family is a little church and a little nation.
—William Gouge[1]
There are few better examples of the beauty and glory of Christian living and of Reformed Christianity in action than the lives of the Puritans at home. Their views on marriage and family life were biblical, positive, and lavish. J. I. Packer writes that the Puritans were “the creators of the English Christian marriage, the English Christian family and the English Christian home.”[2] For the Puritans, marriage was sacred because it was a covenant instituted by God himself (Mal. 2:14). Edmund Morgan summarizes their view:
Every proper marriage since the first was founded on a covenant to which the free and voluntary consent of both parties was necessary. . . . Since time began no man and woman had ever been allowed to fix the terms upon which they would agree to be husband and wife. God had established the rules of…
