The morbid curiosity of the public is thus excited under the convenient plea of satisfying it, while, with regard to the institution of marriage itself, the saying is exemplified, “Give a dog a bad name, and then shoot him.” Marriage is ridiculed, conjugal affection put down as antiquated, home-lovingness pitied as old-fashioned, family reunions voted dull, and, as a natural consequence, youth is more or less alienated from the unfashionable circle. It is easy, then, to turn on marriage as a principle, remove the stumbling-block altogether, paint in seductive colors a substitute for home, and familiarize the public with so-called legal but transient unions. Once this principle is established in the abstract, it will be merely a question of time as to its practical extension. Granted that a man or woman may change companions as often as they choose, who is to regulate how often? Like the husband of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, every day? Why not? Again, if one man may have many “wives,” why should not a woman have many “husbands”? And so on ad infinitum the license might spread unchecked, till there would be as many conflicting interpretations of marriage as there are already of the Bible. Absolute communism [pg 783] would be quite a logical sequence, and, in a society so utterly confused as to parentage, there could be little question as to inheritance!
Christian marriage, on the contrary, has both a social and a sanitary, as well as a religious aspect. It creates a strong and healthy race, and at the very outset of each man's career gives him a position by investing him with a responsibility. He feels that the pride which his old father and mother have in him must not be shamed; that the honor of his family is bound up in his actions; and that his behavior may influence for good or for evil both the moral and temporal prospects of his near kindred. A man so weighted feels a just pride, which, in default of higher motives, may even yet guide him into greatness; and though such a man may yield to temptation, fall into vice, and disgrace himself, so much at least of his early training will survive as to make him feel keenly the shame of his position. This alone has saved hundreds. It has been the serpent in the wilderness to many, but it would no longer be an imaginable motive were the ideal of Christian marriage, with its attendant responsibilities, to be swept away. There is another aspect under which the frequency of divorce and the condoned irregularities of intercourse between the sexes are a constant threat to public security—we mean in provoking murder. Three parts of the fearful murders committed in New York, and also in many other parts of the Union, are traceable more or less to ill-assorted marriages and a spirit of unchristian rebellion against lawful restraints. Lately there has been a glaring case in point, the details of which are fresh in the memory of every one. A man is deliberately shot dead on the very threshold of what is practically a “Divorce Court”; the murderer is a brutal husband incensed at the victim's testimony against himself. In 1872, three of the most famous New York “characters” figured in a terrible drama ending in death, imprisonment, and disgrace. What was the reason that set two of the most unscrupulous speculators in the world at deadly enmity? The disputed favor of a woman who, according to the new code, only asserts her rights, and claims to change “husbands” as often as she pleases. God help the age and nation in which such things are daily done, and where animal passion laughs in the teeth of law! Who does not see how every right and security hangs by the sanctity of marriage? Marriage, in the proper sense of the word, implies exclusive and permanent possession, and represents the first and greatest right of property. If that property is to be made movable, salable, takable, in a word, why not other less sacred and less valuable property also? “Property is theft,” say the socialists, and certainly it is, if we can previously agree to consider marriage so. If all kinds of possessions (life itself included) are to be thus transferable, every individual will be reduced to protect them single-handed against the world, and from this state of things will grow a monster system of organized murder and legalized rapine. The early Californian society would be nothing to this imaginary community.
In France, Italy, and Spain, the infamous laws not only encouraging but actually enforcing civil marriage are sapping the foundations of society; and in England, a country hitherto held as a model for its conjugal and homely tendencies, the tenets of “free-love” are making giant inroads into social life, and leavening the mass of everyday literature. [pg 784] Bigamy and divorce are almost worn-out sensations; they have supplied the ablest pens with thrilling subjects, and have furnished the best theatres with the only dramas that really “take.” Something new and more monstrous yet is needed, and the prurient imagination that shall first succeed in originating a new version of social sin will become the power of the moment.
Such is the present situation. We do not know if there ever has been a worse stage of immorality, except, perhaps, that before the Flood; for at all times of unparalleled license there have been some extenuating circumstances, of which we are afraid we must own ourselves bereft. In the beginning of the Christian era, license was confined to pagans; for in the tottering Roman Empire the Christians were all soldiers of the cross, and their watch for the Bridegroom was too eager to allow them time for temptation; in the transition state that followed, the church's power already made itself felt, and though barbarian kings still defied their pastors, the latter had at hand ecclesiastical terrors that seldom failed in the end to subdue the half-converted Goth or Lombard. In the days of the ill-starred Renaissance, when a spirit of neo-classicism threatened once more to deify sin under the garb of art, the Council of Trent sat in solemn judgment, and condemned abuses which had unhappily paved an easy way for heresy: while later on, even in the days of the wicked and brilliant court of Versailles, there was found a Bourdaloue to rebuke the public sinners who sat in the high places, and to eulogize Christian marriage in the midst of a gathering which seemed to have utterly forgotten its meaning.
Faith still lingered—the faith that made the middle ages what they were—that faith that condemned public sin to as public a penance, and out of great excesses drew great examples. Louise de la Vallière was almost the last representative of this mediæval spirit of generous atonement; and her heroic words, when told in her cloister of the death of her son, “I should weep rather for his birth than for his death,” were the genuine outcome of a faith that could restore a prostitute to innocence, and place upon a once guilty brow almost a virgin's crown.
With Voltaire, the work that Luther had begun was perfected, and henceforth it was not Europe that believed, but only a few scattered exiles who here and there kept the lamp of the faith dimly alight in the stifling atmosphere of universal and fashionable doubt. Even among believers the spirit of ready sympathy, with the slightest indication of the church's unspoken meaning was gone, and there remained only the too self-conscious effort of unquestioning loyalty. Still, thank God! it did and does remain, and, though shorn of all poetry, it is none the less vigorous in self-defence. But we may now say that indeed the flood has broken loose, the Philistines are upon us, the whole array of the world's newest forces is brought to bear against us, and behind her dismantled outposts the church retreats to her citadel, the naked Rock of Peter. Men say that the Council of the Vatican was inopportune, presumptuous, and imprudent; let the world's gracefully lapsing course be a living refutation to such words. Every outward stay is gone; every difficulty in the way of the reunion of pastors is trebled; every see is hedged about with physical bars that are insurmountable; nothing remains free but what cannot be fettered—the tongue. Who can wonder if the church, in this dire emergency, delegates to one [pg 785] man the power she can no longer collectively exercise in peace? As in old Flemish cities there sits up in the lonely belfry of the cathedral a watcher whose duty it is to guard the city against fire, and to warn the people through a brazen trumpet at which spot he descries the first appearance of danger, so in the heart of the City of God there sits now the watchman whose eye and voice are bound to raise the alarm and direct the remedies through the length and breadth of listening Christendom.
The Council of the Vatican has made the word of the Pope the brazen tocsin of the Christian world.
And now, having said so much of the possibilities opened up by the present lax spirit in morals and equally lax interpretation of what remains in the shape of legal restraints upon vice, let us speak of what Christian marriage ought to be. We will be brief, for the position almost defines itself. Of the indissolubility of marriage under all circumstances, even in the case of one of the parties breaking the marriage vow, we will not speak, nor even of the fidelity which marriage requires in every thought and slightest intention. But we would insist upon that which ensures a happy and holy union, namely, the preliminary motive. We have seen how bad marriages and an unworthy idea of this state of life lead to shame, to socialism, to violence, sometimes to a criminal ending in a common jail; let us see now what leads to bad marriages themselves. Two motives there are—one mercenary, and one sensual. We heard a very impressive Jesuit preacher say a few years ago, in the pulpit of one of the most beautiful and frequented churches in London, that to make a good marriage both prayer and seemly preparation are necessary. Some parents, he said, in their pious anxiety to leave all things to Providence, and to avoid that solicitude for worldly things which the Gospel condemns, neglect to avail themselves for their children of the allowable means and legitimate opportunities of social life; but to these he would say, Remember the words of Christ: “Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”[238] On the other hand, many parents sinned far more grievously and—he was loth to say it—more frequently by altogether leaving the Creator out of the question in the serious matter of their children's settlement in life. Which of these two extremes is the prominent one in this country? We need not answer the question. We know too well how nine-tenths of those marriages are made which within a few months or years are broken in the divorce courts, or otherwise dissolved by a shameful esclandre. We know how wealth especially, position, associations, beauty, and accomplishments all rank before moral worth in what is called lightly but too truly the “marriage-market.” We know how marriage is looked forward to through girlhood, not as the assumption of a sacred responsibility, but as the preliminary step to emancipation; we know how it is heartlessly canvassed by men as an expensive but advantageous luxury, its cost being in proportion to the social figure it will enable them to make, but its essence of no deeper moral account to them than the purchase of one trotter or the undertaking of one speculation more or less. We do not say that there are no exceptions to this rule—far from it; but that is just the point: however honorable these cases are, the fact still remains that they are exceptions. Again, where the motive [pg 786] is not directly mercenary, it is often selfish; old men will marry for mere comfort, physical luxury, and the regularity of a well-appointed home—things which the presence of a handsome, thoughtful, and tolerably intellectual woman alone can ensure; women no longer young, but still hungering for the whirl of fashion, will marry unsuitably for the sake of an assured position and means to continue the frivolous course of their former lives; in fact, all shallow disguises of selfishness have their representatives in the “marriage-market,” from that of the millionaire who wants a wife to sit at the head of his table and wear his diamonds, to that of the day-laborer who wants one to cook his dinner, mend his clothes, and eke out his week's earnings by her own hard work. Marriages made in this spirit are unblest and always end badly: the millionaire will divorce his wife, and the laborer murder his in a fit of intoxication; the end is the same, the means differ only according as natural temperament and habits of education diverge.
How far otherwise with marriage in the true Scriptural, Christian sense of the word! In poverty or in riches, alike sacred and full of dignity; always conscious of its sacramental crown; ever mindful of its holy ministry, the salvation of two souls, the ladder to heaven of two lives that without it might have made shipwreck of their eternal interests! A thing apart from the common unions of earth, different from a commercial partnership, stronger than a political coalition, holier than even a spontaneous friendship. A thing which, like the riddle of Samson, is “sweetness out of strength,” and whose grace is so sublime that in heaven it can only find one transformation worthy of itself. “You err, not knowing the power of God; for in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married; but shall be as the angels of God in heaven.”[239] We are not told that the tie will be like brotherhood or like friendship; we are left to infer that between husband and wife some more peculiar link will exist hereafter than will be common to us all as children of the same Father, and it is plainly foretold that this relation will be as that of the angels towards each other.
We have only to look into the gospels and the teachings of the Apostle of the Gentiles to see by what means we may in the married state so sanctify our lives as to deserve this heavenly transformation; we have only to read the marriage-service to learn the plain, straightforward, but most solemn duties, the performance of which will secure us spiritual peace and joy in this life or the next. To use the sacrament worthily, we must come to it with worthy preparation and steadfast intention, first as Christians resolved never to perjure themselves before God, then as rational beings willing to abide by whatever unforeseen consequences their deliberate vow may entail in the future. For it is an idle pretext to allege that, if one party breaks the engagement, the other is de facto absolved from it. Where in the formula, Catholic or Protestant, is this proviso? The only qualifying sentence is this, “Until death do us part.” How, then, can any reasonable person interpret “death” to mean sin, incompatibility, or any other incidental unpleasantness? We think that those who are so ready to foist unwarrantable meanings on the plain and naked oath they have sworn in full possession of their senses at the altar, would hardly be the persons we should like to trust as men or women of unimpeachable [pg 787] honor in the ordinary transactions of life.