Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’intrate,
a deal of curious prying, at least, would precede the decisive steps and few would rashly fly to a “bourn whence no traveller returns.” But when the law points to an easy escape from the consequences of a heedless step, what necessity can there be for heeding? Plenty of prior deliberation and a close scrutiny of its obligations would not have failed to render marriage tolerable, at least, for many who now fret and fume 'neath its galling yoke because they had flown to it in a wanton hour as to a flower to gather sweets from. Festina lente—or, as Sir Thomas Browne quaintly translates it, “Celerity should be contempered with cunctation”—would be a valuable maxim to hold up to the giddy gaze of our modern youth who woo and wed with more sentimental sighs than sober sense; better, by all means, than the cynical “Don’t” of Douglas Jerrold. The knowledge that what God hath joined together no human authority must put asunder, alone can stop those unhallowed unions which curse society by the filthy disclosures they occasion, and blast the happiness, both temporal and eternal, of so many.
At the time when this question was widely discussed in England, and so many eminent authorities opposed the project of law which now rules in the British realms, and which is in the main identical with our own State law, Lord Stowell held the following language, which goes at once to the kernel of the matter and shows a keen appreciation of the worst results of easy divorce. He says: “The general happiness of the married life is secured by its indissolubility. When people understand that they must live together, except for a very few reasons known to the law, they learn to soften, by mutual accommodation, that yoke which they know they cannot shake off; they become good husbands and good wives; for necessity is a powerful master in teaching the duties it imposes.” The church in surrounding marriage with that solemnity which it possesses in the eyes of Catholics, and thus giving greater prominence to its indissoluble character, has thereby supplied to her children the means of softening a union so binding, and from the crucible of suffering offers to both husband and wife a purer gold. In the schedule of conditions essential to the procurement of the best results from marriage she holds to our gaze a larger and deeper culture than current philosophy dreams of—a culture that appeals to the intellect through moral sense, unlike that modern culture which is addressed to the intellect alone. It has almost passed into an axiom in political economy that self must sink out of sight where the interests of many are concerned; and so the church teaches that men and women, having reached that period when the duties of married life ought to be assumed, should thenceforth devote to the service of society those labors they had hitherto bestowed on the prosecution of their individual aims. The culture proceeds from this. Tolerance of each other’s shortcomings on the part of husband and wife is strongly inculcated. A gentle forbearance of mutual peculiarities is enjoined, whereby the noble disposition to forgive the countless trifles of manner, thought, and action which might offend a morbid or fastidious idiosyncrasy is fostered. Thus the Catholic wife or husband, in view of the indissoluble nature of marriage, is taught to round off angularities, to tolerate oddities, to adapt individual views and feelings to special requirements, and to hold all subject to that higher and holier law which tells us that self should not be consulted where duty is concerned.
How many bickerings and misunderstandings, how many of the heart-burnings, how much of all the unhappiness that now mars and disfigures married life, might be avoided if these large and liberal views more generally prevailed! Petty jealousies, the offspring of our baser nature; furtive suspicions, exaggeration of faults, imputation of wrong motives, misinterpretation of harmless actions—in a word, the hundred-and-one incentives to disagreement which beset each day’s path—could find no room in a household harboring this pure and enlightened conception of marriage. We know that the will is as much the subject of discipline as the intellect, and we likewise know that as it is tried, as temptations beset it and are repelled, as suffering is endured without repining, as petty torments, numerous in proportion to their smallness, are patiently borne, the whole character comes forth from the ordeal smoother, sweeter, more spiritual, and stronger, with a life that is not likely to die. Marriage, rightly conceived, is a training-school where many salutary lessons are taught. Its tendency is to strengthen the will, to soften the heart, to remove asperities of character, to evoke the tender and gentle in our nature, and to beget a happiness all its own. Wrongly understood and blindly sought, it is full of perils, not, indeed, imaginary, but real with that terrible reality which court calendars daily reveal in sickening colors.
Thus the standard by which the Catholic Church measures marriage makes it yield a higher culture, more generous, large, and abiding, than can flow from the gross conception which represents it as a contract to be rescinded at will. The Catholic view promotes among the married that freedom of action which loves to borrow the consciousness of doing right from the conviction that the right is freely courted and the wrong freely spurned, and thus paves the way for a nobler plane of conduct. That irritability which inheres so deeply in our nature is what unfits most of us for companionship. It seeks to fasten on others the blame which is our own, or holds them responsible for grievances which are the necessary outcome of human life. If not controlled, it either causes entire estrangement and forfeiture of affection, or leads those towards whom it is manifested to deceptiveness and the employment of crooked ways to reach legitimate ends. A narrow and illiberal life is the result. Darkness and trickery prevail where all should be light and freedom. Evil accumulates on evil, till both parties seek through divorce to free themselves from a yoke that has become intolerable. The shrew will nag and the tyrant husband domineer because a narrow selfishness, bred of this unrestrained irritability, has usurped the place of a large-hearted and gentle forbearance. The knowledge of these possibilities is the most effective armor against their actual occurrence; for it demonstrates in advance the necessity of patience and a tolerant spirit; it hints at a delicate regard for the feelings of others; it leads to a vivid introspection of self, and inclines to a mezzotint view of actions not our own; it discriminates between true love, which is self-sacrificing, gentle, and forgiving, and the counterfeit presentment of love, which is lurid passion, fire without light. And this knowledge is best guaranteed by the conviction that marriage is indissoluble. Urging this view of marriage and the study of these things, the church implicitly holds that a liberal toleration of individual action is essential to the happiness of married life, and that the ignorance which accompanies intolerance must be dispelled ere the ideal picture of married bliss can meet the gaze. Thus Christian freedom goes by the golden mean, on one side of which is domestic tyranny and on the other the rampant license of immorality. Unlike the generality of guides, however the church possesses the means of enforcing her enlightened views, of imparting wise counsel, and offering helpful advice in concrete cases through the Sacrament of Penance. Those who have derived their notion of the confessional from the scurrilous writings of Michelet, the senseless diatribes of Gavazzi, or the eminently vulgar flings of some sensational preachers will be a little startled by this proposition. But let those whose knowledge of the tribunal of penance has been fashioned in the school of bigotry and ignorance consult any intelligent Catholic, husband or wife, and they will find that the web of falsehood in which they have been caught is such that they should blush at their own simplicity for having become entangled in it and held “faster than gnats in cobwebs.” They will find that all those virtues which, even to the commonest understanding, shine clearly forth as the basis of contentment in married life, are here inculcated; that here on the heat and flame of distemper cool patience is sprinkled; that chafes are healed and rankling barbs plucked out; and that magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and love brighten afresh at the latticed crate of the confessional.
But notwithstanding that the church has exhausted prudence and employed every means which common sense could suggest in compassing the integrity of marriage, she seeks not in these the ultima ratio of her action. To her marriage is a sacrament, bestowing grace on those who approach it worthily, and sealing married life with a supernatural impress. This sacramental notion of marriage it is which elevates, purifies, and sanctifies the relation, enables the church to mitigate the evils with which human perversity leavens it, and gives her control where the most restless plotters for the regeneration of society have acknowledged their utter powerlessness to act.
During the controversy which marked the adoption of the Divorce Bill in England its opponents, when twitted with their inconsistency in rejecting the Catholic notion of marriage as a sacrament and still insisting upon its inherent indissolubility, fell, through their reply, into an error which, in proportion to its prevalence, has led to a wide-spread misconception of the grounds on which the Catholic Church claims marriage to be indissoluble. A prominent writer at the time said: “The opinion of the Roman Church itself does not found the indissolubility of marriage on its character as a sacrament, but only conceives the obligation to be enhanced by that circumstance”; and in confirmation of the assertion he quotes the words of the Council of Trent, which are to this effect: Matrimonium, ut naturæ officium consideratur et maxime ut sacramentum, dissolvi non potest. Now, if the words ut maxime be allowed to bear their proper meaning, they certainly prove that the Tridentine fathers intended that the indissolubility of marriage should, before all and above all, rest upon and grow out of the sacramental character of the contract. Ut maxime, if meaning anything, means as far as it is possible, pre-eminently; and so the church regards marriage as naturally indissoluble, but especially so when viewed as a sacrament. The fact proves that the opponents of the bill had little else to fall back on than the falsely-advanced statement that the Catholic Church, the most strenuous advocate of indissolubility, sought the reason of her opinion in the nature of the contract rather than in the character of the sacrament.
But, apart from the declaration of the Council of Trent, the whole history of the church exhibits beyond peradventure her higher estimate of marriage as a sacrament rather than as a contract. She holds it to be, in a mystical sense, the symbol of our Lord’s union with the church, and surely no higher character could attach to it. But this symbolic meaning of marriage rests altogether on its sacramental phase, so that the church views it as a sacrament supernaturally, as a contract naturally, her higher regard for it being in the former sense. The English indissolubilists, therefore, could in no manner object to the proposed Divorce Bill; for, denying marriage to be a sacrament, they surrendered the strongest reason for proclaiming it to be indissoluble. If, as even Gibbon admits, the church has lifted woman from the lowest degradation into which she could be plunged, in which she was the mere slave of man and the toy of his passions, to her present position of respect and independence by investing matrimony with the holiness of a sacrament; and if the church has by the same means purified home-life and cemented its affections, is there not danger that, by dragging down marriage from its high estate, woman may again come to be regarded “not as a person,” as Gibbon says, “but as a thing, so that, if the original title were deficient, she might be claimed, like other valuables, by the use and possession of an entire year”? Such was the law in pagan times, and such it may be again if we list too readily to those modern renovators of society who call marriage tyranny and a “system of legalized prostitution.” Not in vain did St. Simon, Fourier, Le Roux, Fanny Wright, and their co-workers inveigh against Christian marriage. We are now reaping the fruits of their unholy crusade against it. Their labors are to-day blossoming in Oneida County as well as in Utah, in the general rush all round to snap uncongenial ties, and in the woful spread of an evil too base to be mentioned. These form the goal to which such pestilent agitations tend; and if some well-meaning advocates of innovation have not kept step with the leaders, it is not because their principles restrained them, but rather because they have not quite broken away from the influence of early teachings. Marriage, once stripped of its supernatural character, and reduced to the level of a contract, becomes as much the subject-matter of speculation as political systems. Reformers object to this feature of it or to that, and suggest endless modifications. Plato contended that there should be no such thing as marriage proper, and that all children should be surrendered to the state. To-day, in the light which the Gospel has shed on the question, civilized states tolerate a condition akin to that which the Athenian philosopher advocated. And just as Plato, by the sheer force of his commanding intellect, imposed his views on many both in his own time and subsequently, so, it is to be regretted, the skill and eloquence of some modern opponents of marriage are such that they have succeeded in winning hundreds to their standard.
It is a law of our nature that great intellectual force is never unproductive; that it triumphs over many obstacles; and, no matter what may be the cause on the side of which its influence is cast, it is always attended with at least partial success in the achievement of its aims. Now, we have witnessed the most strenuous efforts of powerful minds enlisted in the attempt to abolish marriage. We have had eloquent pleas for socialism, phalansterianism, etc., and it could not but be that these labors were destined to bear issue of some sort. That issue we are contemplating at the present moment; for these assaults on marriage have lowered the general conception of its obligations, its sanctity, and its importance to society. They have lured to a mere mockery hundreds who, when scarce the marriage-kiss has impressed their lips, besiege our courts with petitions for divorce. The influence of pernicious doctrines is deeper and wider than their authors imagine. It does not consist alone in the fact that they draw disciples and beget neophytes; but they weaken faith in what they assail, and thus engender the most pitiful lot of man—scepticism. This is precisely what we now complain of. Our neighbors round about us emphatically eschew the doctrines of the illuminati, of Heine and of Prudhomme, yet they more or less admit that there is some reason in what has been so well said, so forcibly and so eloquently urged. The consequence is that their faith in the true order of things is shaken; they are dissatisfied; they declare the doctrine of indissolubility to be rigoristic; and, provocation given, qualms are brushed aside and they hesitate not to fly to the ready remedy of the law. We may thus set down to the erratic speculations of a few self-appointed social reconstructionists many of the matrimonial miseries and scandals we now deplore. And the leaven is working not alone in the United States, but in every country where the same low estimate of marriage prevails, and where the law is the ready tool of those who desire escape from shackles of their own forging.
In England, where law machinery is more cumbersome than among us and its processes more tedious, not quite so many divorces are obtained, but still the number is on the increase. The English law is much the same as that which rules in New York State, and it is interesting to inquire what reason there can be for the greater percentage of divorces in New York than in England. We hinted that the administration of English law is slower, but that fact is not sufficient to account for a difference so marked. All the influences already enumerated as tending to favor the multiplicity of divorces are as actively at work over there as among ourselves, and hence we must strive to find the explanation of the difference in the different character of the social systems of the two countries. In England society is stratified with such extreme nicety that seldom, if ever, a waif is borne from one stratum to another. Lines are sharply drawn between classes, and the fact is well recognized; for the lowly do not seek to soar, nor do the higher ever entirely lose their social grade. Hence marriages are contracted only between those whose tastes by birth and education agree, whose general views are more apt to harmonize, and whose sympathies mainly run in the same channels. They come to the altar (we employ the word in its current sense) with a better understanding of what each expects from the other, with fewer doubts to frighten them and stronger hopes to sustain them, and hence subsequent collisions and estrangements are less frequent. In our country society has not quite passed out of its formative stage, the elements have not settled into their allotted planes. It still is like an estuary in which the conflict of opposing tides brings to the surface what had just lain at the bottom, and drives to the bottom the bead that had glistened for a moment on the brimming top; in a word, social stratification is not yet complete among us. The result is a tendency to the intermingling of incongruous forces. In the social ferment which is going on some rise suddenly from a lower depth and crystallize in their new plane by marriage, some fall and remain below on the same condition. Here wealth is a potent escort to lead its possessors higher up than they could hope to reach without the aid of this glittering talisman. A little veneer and a resolute lack of shamefacedness often enable those whom suddenly-acquired riches have lifted above their former level to hold their new station till marriage has assured it to them and given them a title to their position. But rapidly as wealth lifts in the social scale, more rapidly still does poverty drag down, and we have not yet fully developed, though happily we are fast coming to it, that public sentiment which refuses to behold loss of caste in loss of wealth. Till then a lower social level is the certain bourn of those who have fallen from opulence, just as a niche higher up in the social temple awaits the nouveau riche.