The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

Evidently, then, the times demanded that Jesus should save the marriage law from looseness. The ease of divorce was not unlike that in our own land to-day. If the teaching of Jesus was needed then it is needed now in order that marriage may recover its binding solemnity. On general principles we must all rejoice that Jesus did not give a dubious word on this sacred matter. It may be doubted whether any man who did not have the cause of his own pleasure to serve and who was not willing to subordinate a social law to the superficial joy of his own life, would be willing to modify the Saviour’s teaching. Certainly that teaching has long been the firm bulwark of the married life. Had Jesus spoken with doubt, or had he given sanction to easy divorce, what would the results have been? Our homes would have been builded upon the sands of freakish impulses and of hasty tempers. But Jesus’s word puts rock into the domestic foundation. When it was given it was met by all of the objections which it still evokes. Some said that the teaching was extreme in its severity, quite outdoing the law of Moses in its demands. Others said that rather than to submit to a bond so unbreakable, it would be better not to marry at all. Still Jesus did not lower his teaching. God was the author of marriage; man must not assume to be its destroyer. God takes two persons and makes them one flesh; man must not cut that vital bond.

Plainly, then, Jesus felt that marriage established a family relationship which was to resemble other family relationships in its indissolubleness. How can a man get rid of his brother, or his sister, or his father or mother, when God has decreed a relation in the flesh that cannot be severed? One may live apart from brother or sister, or father or mother, as a matter of convenience or peace; but how can one destroy the relationship? In spite of angry decrees, is not the brother still a brother, and do not father and mother remain father and mother in defiance of all unfilial pronouncements of divorce? In Jesus’s view the second family relationship was as indissoluble as the first. If one were to argue from a certain standpoint it might be easy to claim that it must be even more indissoluble. A man does not choose his first home. It represents a necessity against which he may not strive. But he does choose his second home, and it represents a union for which he is himself distinctly responsible. Why should a man be allowed to divorce himself from the home which is founded by his liberty while still being inexorably bound to the home which was founded without his choice? Jesus taught that the very constitution of society, as resting on the word of God, demanded that the second home be as sacredly unbreakable as the first. The “one flesh” must not be severed in either case.

Hence it comes about that, while the law of Jesus does not allow divorce, unless for the one reason mentioned later, it does not forbid separation. The sin does not consist in putting away the wife when conditions are unbearable; it does consist in marrying another. He does not insist that the quarrelsome shall live amid their brawls; but he does insist that they shall not go into another experiment that degrades a sacred covenant. We do not long listen to the specious arguments for easy divorce, with the privilege of remarriage, without discovering that these arguments affirm either that personal purity is impossible or that personal convenience and pleasure are the primary demands of life. Jesus did not so teach. Dr. Peabody, in his matchless discussion of Jesus’s teaching about the family, well says: “The family is, to Jesus, not a temporary arrangement at the mercy of uncontrolled temper or shifting desire; it is ordained for that very discipline in forbearance and restraint which are precisely what many people would avoid, and the easy rupture of its union blights these virtues in their bud. Why should one concern himself in marriage to be considerate and forgiving, if it is easier to be divorced than it is to be good?” (Jesus Christ and the Social Question, p. 159.) That these words touch the evil heart of many modern divorces there can be no doubt. The emphatic teaching of Jesus was that marriage should not be regarded as a breakable agreement of convenience, but rather as an indissoluble pledge of permanent union.

Whether Jesus allowed any exception to this law remains a debatable matter among the scholars. Some contend that the “save for fornication” clause is an interpolation, and that the teaching of Jesus admitted no divorce whatsoever. Others contend that the gospel writers who omit this clause regarded the one reason for divorce as so certain that it was not deemed necessary to mention its legitimacy. It may be claimed with a show of reason that the regarding of adultery as an exceptional sin against the married life stands for something instinctive in human nature. Notwithstanding all statements that desertion and abuse and drunkenness may be so aggravated as to constitute offenses worse than fornication, normal men and women continue to assign a lonely infamy to the sin of carnal unfaithfulness. If Jesus did use the exceptional clause there is not wanting evidence that his word is confirmed by an all but universal feeling. Many races have been disposed to decree that the sin of adultery is the one iniquity sharp and incisive enough to sever the “one flesh.” Perhaps it is safe to affirm that the great majority of good men and women do not shrink from the exception as being unworthy of Jesus’s teaching. But, the exception being granted, that teaching is clear and uncompromising. When that teaching becomes the law of the world divorce courts will be largely emptied and the marriage vows will be assumed with less haste and with more solemnity.

The New Testament is thus seen to be the headquarters of that conception of marriage that alone gives a firm foundation to the home. It is impossible to conceive what would have been the dismal statistics of divorce, if Jesus had made the marriage bond of slender strength. Truly the situation is bad enough as it is. Often the causes for divorce are trivial; sometimes they are deliberately arranged by the separating parties! and occasionally the much-married comedian is hailed on the stage with a joking tolerance. But when more than ninety per cent of the marriages of the land stand the tests of time and are kept in fidelity until the “one flesh” is severed by death, it is evident that some strong force still guards the home from desecration.

We need not inquire what that force is; it is the Word of Christ. Among those who follow him least, he has made divorce “bad form”; among those who follow him somewhat, he has made it doubtful morals; while among those who accept him as Lord and Master, he has made it sacrilege and blasphemy. The devotees of pleasure and convenience and lust may well quarrel with the decree of Christ. The devotees of compromise may seek to refine and discount his explicit law. Yet all those who see in the home the very center and heart of a properly organized society, as well as the very ordination of the Lord God Almighty, will not cease to be grateful that Christ spoke so unmistakably concerning its solemn sanction. He fixed forever the difference between the civil marriage and the Christian marriage. He filled the marriage service with religious terms. “The sight of God,” “instituted of God,” “mystical union,” “holy estate,” “Cana of Galilee,” “reverently, discreetly, and in the fear of God,” “God’s ordinance,” “forsaking all other,” “so long as ye both shall live,” “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,” “the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” “God hath joined together,” “in holy love until their lives’ end”—all these words are Christ’s words, his Spirit confirmed them in the service of his church. That service may well close with the prayer which declares that his is “the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.”

More and more careful students of both sociology and Christianity will see that no safe conception of marriage can be found save in the words of the Lord. The civil contract idea is full of peril. The case of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet, is in evidence. The illustration may be extreme, but it will the better show the sure goal of that theory of marriage that forgets God. Shelley, for a time at least, was an outright atheist. Bowing God out of the universe, he could not consistently leave God in his theory of marriage. His college thesis was an argument for atheism. Given sufficient provocation and motive, Shelley was sure to reach the limit of a godless idea of marriage. It seems almost impossible for men with a literary mania to see social or moral fault in their heroes, and their tendency often is to absolve writers of genius from the usual laws. Shelley married the daughter of a retired innkeeper. In two years he separated from his wife and two children. Three years later the wife drowned herself, meeting voluntarily a fate which Shelley was to meet involuntarily. An apologist for Shelley says, “The refinements of intellectual sympathy which poets desiderate in their spouses Shelley failed to find in his wife, but for a time he lived with her not unhappily; nor to the last had he any fault to allege against her, except such negative ones as might be implied in his meeting a woman he liked better.” The more we study this language the more does its superficiality impress us. Let it be said that Shelley was young and heedless when he first married; let it be said, also, that he was in general strangely lovable and warmly philanthropic; and let it be said, even, that he was in his lifetime execrated beyond his deserts. But it would not be so easy to palliate his conduct if one’s own daughter had drowned herself to end her sorrow, or if one’s own daughter had traveled with him, unmarried, over France and Switzerland! Somehow literary admiration plays tricks on moral natures. Doubtless the judgment of Shelley on the basis of his boyish poem “Queen Mab” was unfair, even as its surreptitious publication without his consent was unfair. None the less one may trace a connection between his college production in defense of atheism and his later domestic conduct. No marriage has a sure foundation apart from a religious sanction. The more we consider the possibilities suggested by this confessedly extreme illustration, the more will we cling to the strict theory of Jesus as against the limping logic of any loose sociologist.

We have thus seen that the foundation of the home comes to the Bible, and particularly to the goal of the Bible’s revelation in Christ, for its solidity. Other foundations are fashioned of yielding sand. The marriage ceremony might well be modified in some minor regards; but the word of Christ will insist that the ceremony shall represent no flimsy contract. While he rules the pronouncement will be, “God hath joined together”; and the human response will remain, “till death us do part.”

The relation of Jesus to the home goes farther than his word about marriage, deep and far-reaching as that is. His life emphasized the sacredness of the family relation. He went back from the scene in the Temple to be “subject unto his parents.” He wrought his first miracle on the occasion of a marriage. Many of his miracles of mercy were performed in answer to a family plea. He heard the cry of a mother when he healed the daughter of the Syrophœnician woman, and again when he raised up the son of the widow of Nain. He heard the cry of a father when he cast out the evil spirit and restored a stricken son, clothed and in his right mind. He heard the cry of sisters when he stood weeping at the grave of Lazarus. The domestic plea quickly reached his heart and summoned his aid. It was so even in the personal sense. In the agony of the crucifixion he did not fail to commend his mother to the care of his best-to-do disciple, and to cause the writing of that simple statement, “From that day that disciple took her into his own home.”

Indeed, through all the life of Jesus he glorified the family, unless the family stood in the way of his truth or work. Emerson said once, “I will hate my father and my mother when my genius calls me.” We all know where Emerson got those words; they were not written on his own authority. Jesus made our human ancestry subject to our divine ancestry. Above the earthly parents he saw the heavenly Father. The God who ordained the home was above the home. But Jesus would allow no other exception. He himself lived by that supreme law. He was homeless in obedience to his own divine mission. There is a peculiar illustration of this, hidden somewhat by our awkward distribution of the Bible into chapters and verses. The seventh chapter of John ends with the words, “They went every man to his own house.” It is not difficult for us to reproduce the scene, even with its Oriental touches. The discussion of the day is over. The hearers did what men and women have been doing ever since—they turned to the twinkling lights of their homes. Soon the crowds had disappeared and the various persons had joined themselves to their family groups. The homeless One was left alone. The first verse of the eighth chapter of John says, “Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.” It was just an instance of his tragedy, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” The homelessness of Jesus was vicarious. Sometimes still he calls his own into the same vicariousness. He separates sons and daughters from their fathers and mothers and sends them afar to preach his kingdom. Wherever those homeless ones may go, the meaning of home takes on a new and sacred meaning. They carry with them the Word and Spirit of him who, being weary, invited the weary ones to come to him for rest; being thirsty, invited the thirsty ones to drink of the water of life; being poor, invited the poor to come to him for riches; being dead, invited the dying ones to look to him for eternal life; and, being homeless, still commands the world to look to him for the spirit of home. Even though he himself went down into the darkness of the Mount of Olives, ever since his day the people that have heard and heeded his word have found the lights of home more inviting and the mission of the home more divine.