"My wife is criminal, and I suffer the punishment. A woman is necessary to the comfort of my life—nay, even to the preservation of my virtue; yet she is refused me by the Church, which forbids me to marry an honest woman. The civil law of the present day, which is, unhappily, founded on the canon law, deprives me of the rights of humanity. The Church compels me to seek either pleasures which it reprobates, or shameful consolations which it condemns; it forces me to be criminal.
"If I look round among the nations of the earth, I see no religion except the Roman Catholic which does not recognize divorce and second marriage as a natural right. What inversion of order, then, has made it a virtue in Catholics to suffer adultery and a duty to live without wives when their wives have thus shamefully injured them? Why is a cankered tie indissoluble, notwithstanding the great maxim adopted by the code, Quicquid ligatur dissolubile est? A separation of person and property is granted me, but not a divorce. The law takes from me my wife, and leaves me the word sacrament! I no longer enjoy matrimony, but still I am married! What contradiction! What slavery!
"Nor is it less strange that this law of the Church is directly contrary to the words which it believes to have been pronounced by Jesus Christ: Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery."
"I have no wish here to inquire whether the pontiffs of Rome have a right to violate at pleasure the law of Him whom they regard as their Master; whether when a kingdom wants an heir, it is allowable to repudiate the woman who is incapable of giving one; nor whether a turbulent wife, one attacked by lunacy, or one guilty of murder, should not be divorced as well as an adulteress; I confine myself to what concerns my own sad situation. God permits me to marry again, but the bishop of Rome forbids me.
"Divorce was customary among Catholics under all the emperors, as well as in all the disjointed members of the Roman Empire. Almost all those kings of France who are called of the first race, repudiated their wives and took fresh ones. At length came one Gregory IX., an enemy to emperors and kings, who, by a decree, made the bonds of marriage indissoluble; and his decretal became the law of Europe. Hence, when a king wished to repudiate an adulterous wife, according to the law of Jesus Christ, he could not do so without seeking some ridiculous pretext. St. Louis was obliged, in order to effect his unfortunate divorce from Eleanora of Guienne, to allege a relationship which did not exist; and Henry IV., to repudiate Margaret of Valois, brought forward a still more unfounded pretence—a want of consent. Thus a lawful divorce was to be obtained by falsehood.
"What! may a sovereign abdicate his crown, and shall he not without the pope's permission abdicate his faithless wife? And is it possible that men, enlightened in other things, have so long submitted to this absurd and abject slavery?
"Let our priests and our monks abstain from women, if it must be so; they have my consent. It is detrimental to the progress of population and a misfortune for them; but they deserve that misfortune which they have contrived for themselves. They are the victims of the popes, who in them wish to possess slaves—soldiers without family or country, living for the Church; but I, a magistrate, who serve the state the whole day long, have occasion for a woman at night; and the Church has no right to deprive me of a possession allowed me by the Deity. The apostles were married, Joseph was married, and I wish to be married. If I, an Alsatian, am dependent on a priest who lives at Rome and has the barbarous power to deprive me of a wife, he may as well make me a eunuch to sing Miserere in his chapel."
A Plea for Wives.
Equity requires that, after giving this memorial in favor of husbands, we should also lay before the public the plea on behalf of wives, presented to the junta of Portugal, by one Countess D'Arcira. It is in substance as follows:
"The gospel has forbidden adultery to my husband as well as to me; we shall be damned alike; nothing is more certain. Although he has been guilty of fifty infidelities—though he has given my necklace to one of my rivals, and my earrings to another, I have not called upon the judges to order his head to be shaved, himself to be shut up with monks, and his property to be given to me; yet I, for having but once imitated him—for having done that with the handsomest young man in Lisbon, which he is allowed to do every day with the homeliest and most stupid creatures of the court and the city, must be placed on a stool to answer the questions of a set of licentiates, every one of whom would be at my feet were he alone with me in my closet; must have the finest hair in the world cut from my head; be confined with nuns who have not common sense; be deprived of my portion and marriage settlement, and see my property given to my fool of a husband to assist him in seducing other women and committing fresh adulteries. I ask if the thing is just? if it is not evident that the cuckolds are the lawmakers?