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50. God meant that human marriage should be a type of Christ's union with the Church, or "New Jerusalem," His bride. Christ laid aside all His glory with His Father and came to this earth to unite Himself to us. But marriage was not meant merely to typify Christ's first coming, but to include the thought of His second coming as well; only in both these events does the type fully represent the antitype. Every Christian marriage should celebrate these two events. The husband's renunciation of ties of kinship should offset the wife's renunciation of self-love by taking up the risks of childbearing and child rearing. This is what Paul teaches, in Ephesians 5:31, 32, where he quotes the obligation that the husband should forsake his kindred for his wife, and adds, "I speak concerning Christ and the Church." Adam and Eve were created at the same time, and were together, and then they were separated during a "deep sleep," which came upon Adam. So Christ was with us, and then separated from us by the "deep sleep" of death, while we came, as it were, from His risen side, by faith in His shed blood. Adam was separated, that he might be re-united to Eve, in greater joy than ever,—such joy that poetry burst from his lips, in celebration of the event, which Dr. R. F. Horton renders:

51. And one day Christ will come again, "to our joy,"—for it was "expedient" for Him to go, and return again, He told us. And one day we shall recognize, as we do not now, that Christ is our very "other self," as Adam did of Eve; "for we are members of His body," and "joined to the Lord," we are "one spirit," also. Mary Magdalene seems to have first discovered this, in experience,—for she exclaimed to the supposed gardener: "Tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away,"—an unconscious claiming of His body as her very own property, in a love of sexless chastity. No wonder that He could but manifest Himself to such love! (John 20:11-18).