"So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us say that human nature, our nature, cares about it a great deal.... The Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most dangerous moral disease."
In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas and its spiritual significance:
"When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it celebrate? We answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus."
"That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did homage—pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason."
So much I have quoted in order to show that, in relation to the most important department of human conduct, Arnold's influence, to use his own phrase, "made for righteousness," and made for righteousness unequivocally and persistently. So keen was his sense of the supreme value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what old-fashioned theologians would have called a "hedge of the law."[41] In season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage. For the Divorce Court and all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it, with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe, perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the sacredness of marriage. Man's progress, he says, depends on his keeping such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to laxity, he was the unsparing foe.
It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in his eightieth year and Prime Minister of England, figured in a very unseemly affair which had the Divorce Court for its centre. Arnold writes as follows: "We had —— with us one day. He was quite full of the Lord Palmerston scandal, which your charming newspaper, the Star—that true reflection of the rancour of Protestant Dissent in alliance with all the vulgarity, meddlesomeness, and grossness of the British multitude—has done all it could to spread abroad. It was followed yesterday by the Standard, and is followed to-day by the Telegraph. Happy people, in spite of our bad climate and cross tempers, with our penny newspapers!"
The admirable satire of Friendship's Garland is constantly levelled against national aberrations in this direction. In the year 1870 there was a fashionable divorce-case, more than usually scandalous, and the disgusting narrative had been followed with keen interest by those who look up at the Aristocracy as men look up at the stars. In reference to this case, he quotes to his imaginary friend Arminius the noble sentiment of Barrow: "Men will never be heartily loyal and submissive to authority till they become really good; nor will they ever be very good till they see their leaders such." To which Arminius replies, in his thoughtful manner: "Yes, that is what makes your Lord C——s so inexpressibly precious!" A certain Lord C——, be it observed, having figured very conspicuously in the trial.
With reference to the enormous publicity given in England to such malefic matter, Arnold says to Arminius: "When a Member of Parliament wanted to abridge the publicity given to the M—— case, the Government earnestly reminded him that it had been the solemn decision of the House of Commons that all the proceedings of the Divorce Court should be as open as the day. When there was a suggestion to hear the B—— case in private, the upright magistrate who was appealed to said firmly that he could never trifle with the public mind in that manner. All this was as it should be. So far, so good. But was the publicity in these cases perfectly full and entire? Were there not some places which the details did not reach? There were few, but there were some. And this, while the Government has an organ of its own, the London Gazette, dull, high-priced, and of comparatively limited circulation! I say, make the price of the London Gazette a halfpenny; change its name to the London Gazette and Divorce Intelligencer; let it include besides divorce news, all cases whatever that have an interest of the same nature for the public mind; distribute it gratis to mechanics' institutes, workmen's halls, seminaries for the young (these latter more especially), and then you will be giving the principle of publicity a full trial. This is what I often say to Arminius; and, when he looks astounded, I reassure him with a sentence which, I know very well, the moment I make it public will be stolen by the Liberal newspapers. But it is getting near Christmas-time, and I do not mind making them a present of it. It is this: The spear of freedom, like that of Achilles, has the power to heal the wounds which itself makes."
In Friendship's Garland, from the very structure of the book, his serious judgments have to be delivered by the mouth of his Prussian friend; and here is his judgment on our public concessions to pruriency—"By shooting all this garbage on your public, you are preparing and assuring for your English people an immorality as deep and wide as that which destroys the Latin nations."
But his "hedge of the law" had other thorns besides those with which he pierced the Divorce Court and its hideous literature. He had shrewd sarcasms for all who, by whatever method, sought to gratify "that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth—the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality." He poured scorn on the newspapers which glorified "the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race," and the author who extolled the domestic life of Mormonism. "Mr. Hepworth Dixon may almost be called the Colenso of Love and Marriage—such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion." He thus forecasts the doings of a Philistine House of Commons in 1871. "Mr. T. Chambers will again introduce that enfranchising measure, against which I have had some prejudices—the Bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life." All these various attempts to break down the "hedge of the law" received in turn their merited condemnation; but always we are brought back from the consideration of kindred evils, to the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife's sister. Thus the imaginary leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph summarizes the controversy: "Why, I ask, is Mr. Job Bottles' liberty, his Christian liberty, as our reverend friend would say, to be abridged in this manner? And why is Protestant Dissent to be diverted from its great task of abolishing State Churches for the purpose of removing obstacles to the 'sexual insurrection' of our race? Why are its poor devoted ministers to be driven to contract, in the interests of Christian liberty, illegal unions of this kind themselves, pour encourager les autres? Why is the earnest Liberalism and Nonconformity of Lancashire and Yorkshire to be agitated on this question by hope deferred? Why is it to be put incessantly to the inconvenience of going to be married in Germany or in the United States, that greater and better Britain—