"But you have, along with your saints, some very foolish rules in your church, Francis. Take the case of Mrs. MacBirney. There is a woman who has done evil to no one and good to every one. She finds herself married to a man who thenceforth devotes himself to but one object in life--the piling up of money. She is forgotten and neglected. That is not the worst; he, with no religion of his own, makes it his business to harass and worry her in the practice of hers. He is filled with insane jealousies, and moved by equally insane hatreds of whatever she desires. I come into their lives. I see this proud and unhappy woman struggling to keep her trials hidden. I break down the barriers of her reserve--not easily, not without being repulsed and humiliated as I never before have been by a woman--and at last make her, unwillingly, tell me the truth. Meantime her husband, after a scene--of which I have never yet learned the real facts--has left her. I say such a woman has the right to free herself from a brute such as this; your church says 'no.'"
"Robert, I see what you are coming to. But do not make the case harder than it is. She may free herself from him if she cannot live in peace with him; she may leave him under intolerable conditions. But not marry again."
"Precisely. And I offer her my devotion and a home and only ask to make her truly my wife and restore to her the religion he has robbed her of. And this very religion that he has trampled on and throttled, what does it say? 'No.'"
"You state a hard case. Your reasoning is very plausible; you plead for the individual. There is no law, human or divine, against which the individual might not show a case of hardship. The law that you find a hardship protects society. But to-day, society is nothing, the individual everything. And while society perishes we praise the tolerant anarchism that destroys it."
"Francis, you invoke cruelty. What do I care for society? What has society done for me?"
"No, I invoke responsibility, which none of us can forever escape. You seek remarriage. Your care is for the body; but there is also the soul."
"Your law is intolerant."
"Yours is fatal. How often have you said to me--for you have seen it, as all thoughtful men see it--that woman is sinking every day from the high estate to which marriage once lifted her. And the law that safeguards this marriage and against which you protest is the law of God. I cannot apologize for it if I would; I would not if I could. Think what you do when you break down the barrier that He has placed about a woman. It is not alone that the Giver of this law died a shameful death for the souls of men. You do not believe that Christ was God, and Calvary means nothing to you.
"But, Robert, to place woman in that high position, millions of men like you and me, men with the same instincts, the same appetites, the same passions as yours and mine, have crucified their desires, curbed their appetites, and mastered their passions--and this sacrifice has been going on for nineteen hundred years and goes on about us every day. Who realizes it?
"Faith is ridiculed, fasting is despised, the very idea of self-denial is as absurd to pagan to-day as it was nineteen hundred years ago to pagan Rome. And with its frivolous marriages and easy divorces the world again drags woman back to the couch of the concubine from which Christianity with so much blood and tears lifted her up nineteen hundred years ago."