CHAPTER XIII.
THROWS A LITTLE LIGHT ON A SUBJECT SOMETIMES UNCTUOUSLY CONDESCENDED UPON BY PREACHERS OF "WORDS."
I wonder where Christians find authority for our modern treatment of illegitimacy? Preachers of all sects are never tired of telling us that they preach peace and goodwill among men. Their religion is to redeem all wrongs, to make mankind better, to lift the fallen, and cheer the broken-hearted. So at least they say, but when we look for deeds, we do not find many in this lower world. The fulfilment of the Christian ideal is prudently (?) adjourned to the next, above or below. Wherever one turns in contemplation of modern Christianity, one finds a ghastly divergence between its professions and its practice, and at no point is this more visible than in the behaviour of the Churches towards women who have sinned. Taking their tone from a corrupt society, which desires to enjoy its vices, and to prey upon its women without taking upon itself responsibilities which the poor besotted Turk even never dreams of shirking, the dispensers of the gospel of peace lead the chorus of reprobation which is heaped upon the woman, who, like the virgin mother so many of them profess to worship, bears the burden of maternity in shame and loneliness. No distinction is drawn between woman and woman—rarely or ever is the guilt of the man considered; the duties of fatherhood can be neglected by the seducer with tacit, nay, often with the full approbation of society and the Churches. But on the woman a penalty falls that is worse than death. She has yielded to the seducer, and henceforth she must be pressed down and cast out, unless—and the distinction is important—she be a sinner of the highest caste in society, when the sin may be covered with lies as with an embroidered garment; or, unless she belong to the lowest, where the difference between morality and immorality is too often nearly indistinguishable—thirteen centuries of more or less well-paid-for priestly instruction notwithstanding. Speaking broadly, however, the law of social life condemns the "unattached" woman and her offspring to obloquy and degradation, and it does this not merely without the protest of the Churches, but by their full sanction. For ages priests of all hues have arrogated to themselves the power of regulating the union of the sexes; without their rites and blessings no two human beings could become man and wife. When two were thus united the universal cry was "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder." The priest, in fact, arrogated to himself the power of the Deity. His "joining" was God's, and none but his held on Earth or in Heaven. Greater blasphemy has hardly ever been committed even by priests. By this abominable fraud—this false assumption of authority—deeper social wrongs have come upon the world than from any other priestly assumption whatsoever. The priest has habituated society to disregard all ties formed in what is called an illegitimate manner. It has sanctioned the desertion of women by their seducers, and what is even worse, the desertion of children by their fathers and mothers, for, of course, if the parents were not priest-joined, the offspring must be of the devil. A man may, according to this dogma, have lived the life of a fiend, ruining women, bringing children into the world to live or die as the poor law or hunger should order; but this is no hindrance to his obtaining the blessing of "the Church" should he one day take it into his head to submit to be married to one woman—for gain, for any reason, or none.
Scoundrel and saint are alike welcome to the priest's services and blessings if the marriage fees be paid; and with the full concurrence and blessing of any sectary in the world, a man may disjoin himself from a woman or women he has lived with for years in order to take another, if there was no marriage uniting him to these he deserted. God, of course, could not be expected to "join" those who never sought a priest's help. The whole basis of this treatment of the sexes is grossly and blasphemously immoral, and the fruits of it are visible on every side. To it we owe the highly nourishing character of the "social evil" quite as much as to man's inherent depravity, and we shall never really begin to overcome that evil until the whole of the teachings and assumptions of the sects, as applied to marriage and divorce, are swept clean out of the public mind.
Who is there to whom the history of some poor woman betrayed and deserted is not known—a woman, it may be, tender-hearted and true, as worthy of wifehood as any of her sex? Did society pity that woman? Have you pitied her? Perhaps, but would you not also gather up your garments and pass by on the other side, if you met her in public? Habit is so strong, you will say in excuse; yes, yes, habit is strong, and the woman is weak. Why should one heed her? She brought her fate on herself. Leave her to perish. The man she loved has left her, and the world treats her no worse than he. If her own sex spits upon her and hisses at her, what can man do? These be the thoughts of most men over broken lives, and most readers may therefore feel impatient that I should linger over the ruin and fall of a poor peasant lass. Yet what can I do? my task is to write the history of this family; its sorrows and failings, its burdens and tears, are all that it has wherewith to claim the world's attention. And to my thinking, they mean much. Their lives were real to them, as yours, reader, is to you, and they had a part in making up the pitiful social life of this decrepit old England possibly just as high as yours.
Therefore must I ask you to turn aside with me for a moment to look again on Sally Wanless, when she reappears from her seclusion—a shame mother, with a babe born to sorrow and shame in her arms. I have said reappears, but she has not yet ventured to meet the, to her, scathing gaze of the people in the village street. She steals into the little garden behind her father's cottage, and there, in the soft September afternoons, you would find her seated beneath the shade of an old apple tree, face to face with her doom, and looking at it as one who has no hope.
In some people the soul wakes late; some, indeed, appear to pass through the world without its ever awakening. They may be bright-hearted people, full of animal life and spirits, capable of much work and a few sacrifices, yet they have never risen up to full consciousness of the meaning of life, to its higher impulses, and its terrible risks and obligations. No great inward commotion has ever visited them; they vegetate tamely on till they reach the grave. Others, like Thomas Wanless, awake early to consciousness of the mystery and burden of existence, and battle with hopes and fears their lives long.
Would that his daughter had also found the realities of living ere the curse of life had come upon her! But she did not. Her awakening came too late. While it was possible she hid from herself the meaning of her fall, and refused to look at the awful questions which for the first time surged in upon her soul. It was not possible for long. When the wail of her infant first broke on her ear she awoke and was stricken with the full consciousness of what she had lost. Her past life stood out before her as something apart; its hopes belonged to another state of existence, to a life in which her future could have no part. All lonely at the heart she had borne the pains of motherhood, and a feeble infant lay by her side bearing witness against her now and evermore. No father welcomed it. The sound of its feeble cry brought a forsakenness about the mother's heart nothing could remove. In vain her mother soothed her. In vain her true-hearted father, bravely hiding away his shame and grief, took the little one in his arms and fondled it with a fatherhood that assumed all the sin and all the responsibilities of his child. Sarah could not be comforted. Blank despair took possession of her. Why was she not dead? Why did the child live? Surely they would be both better dead and buried out of sight for ever? This was the under tone of her thoughts now, save when at times, and as she grew strong again, gusts of passion like her father's would sweep over her soul. Then she felt for moments as if she could compel the world to stop and witness her revenge. Should a fit like this master her, what might one so desperate not do? Hers was a soul awake and in prison, but if it burst its bonds?