Let your conscience be the mirror in which you behold the nature of your obedience.
A new wound is easily closed and healed; but the old wounds of the soul are cured, if ever, with great difficulty.
He is truly virtuous who expects his death every day; but he is a saint who desires it every hour.
Marriage In The Nineteenth Century.
“Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.”—Matt. xxiv. 35.
It is only truth that is immutable in this world, and only truth's representative that dare speak to-day the same language it spoke eighteen, twelve, or three centuries ago.
Truth cannot progress, for it partakes of the nature of God's perfection; it is not an ideal of our own evolving, susceptible of improvement as our knowledge grows wider, but a type towards which we are, on the contrary, making slow stages of assimilation. Of all individual parts of truth, hardly one of which remains in our day unassailed, none is so fiercely attacked as the truth about marriage. And yet, as we have shown in a previous paper,[232] almost every argument against it has repeatedly been put forward by barbarians and Romans, Byzantine emperors and feudal chiefs, and borne out by all the imposing display of military force, legal servility, and even ecclesiastical truculence. One might almost say of the agitation against marriage in our day, “What has been will be, and what will be has been.” If it is no longer in the individual passions of kings and nobles that the conflict centres, it is still a “sovereign” who plays the part of Philip Augustus or Henry VIII.—the “sovereign people.” Instead of one mighty colossus, it is a legion of personally obscure individuals which the church finds opposed to her; but the principle is the same, the issue is identical. What councils and embassies did formerly is now done oftener and in privacy; new agencies have widened the possibilities of communication, of discussion, and of adjustment, and causes are more rapidly multiplied, as well as more speedily settled. The press has lent its power to the altar, and redeemed, in part, its too well-earned reputation as a pander and a tempter; and besides these new helps, we have, as of old, all those oft-tried resources of personal eloquence, canonical censures, and grievous penances.
Still the question is exactly the same in the nineteenth as it was in all preceding centuries: Shall passion or reason rule mankind? Shall the most sacred of all rights of property be protected and maintained, or shall communism be allowed gradually to extirpate the human race?
The historian Rohrbacher, whom we have often quoted in the paper referred to above, specially insists upon the confusion which the legalized disruption or total disregard of the marriage vow would introduce into society, and supports his opinion by that of De Maistre. He also adduces the argument that, since the creation of man in the earthly Paradise was a perfect and complete act, and only one woman was there joined to one man, therefore the union of one man and one woman was distinctly God's type of what he meant all future unions to be. We might speak of many Scripture proofs of the original institution of marriage being a state of perpetual monogamy until death, but such proofs would [pg 777] involve too lengthy a sketch of one portion of the subject, and this aspect has been so often discussed that we turn with a feeling of relief to any less hackneyed view of the question.