HQ 734 .F7 
 
 Forsyth, Peter Taylor, 1848 
 
 1921. 
 Marriage : its ethic and 
 
MARRIAGE 
 
 ITS ETHIC AND RELIGION 
 
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
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 LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 
, NOV 
 
 MARRIAGE V 
 
 ITS ETHIC AND RELIGION 
 
 / BY 
 
 V 
 
 P. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF HACKNEY COLLEGE, HAMPSTEAD 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 
 
Ptittfed by Hazel! , Watson & Viney, Ld., London and AyUsburv. 
 
NOTE 
 
 The following pages are the expansion of 
 a Lecture delivered in connection with 
 the National Council of Public Morals. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Age's Uncreating Word . . 3 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Marriage as Individual, Social, and 
 
 Religious . . . . .11 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Christian View of Marriage. 1. 
 
 As Monogamous . . . .25 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Christian View of Marriage. 2. 
 
 As Permanent (Divorce) . . 37 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Christian View of Marriage. 3. 
 As Ethical (The Object of Mar- 
 riage) ...... 57 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Matter of Subordination . . 69 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Leasehold Marriage .... 83 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Woman's Protest ... 99 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 A Conservative Sanctuary . . Ill 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 Love's Dignity and Sincerity . .119 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 The Effect of Literature . .133 
 
 Epilogue ...... 151 
 
THE AGE'S UNCREATING WORD 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE age's UNCREATING WORD 
 
 npHE present is an age of what Mr. 
 Balfour in one of his books aptly 
 calls the Uncr eating Word. Old insti- 
 tutions are either being reconstructed in 
 practice, or they are being dissolved in 
 thought underneath the existing practice. 
 We are in a great day of judgment — in 
 this sense at least, that we are deep in 
 the critical age and the constructive age 
 has barely begun. Dogma, as dogma, has 
 ceased to reign ; and Idealism, which 
 ruled for a time, has lost much influence, 
 even where it keeps its crown. Society 
 seems to have become so stable, so un- 
 sinkable, that we feel safe to challenge all 
 risks at full speed. We cannot believe 
 
4 THE AGE'S UNCREATING WORD 
 
 that the essential boons of civiUsation 
 will be lost, and we think we can toy with 
 a great many of the sanctions under which 
 they have been secured. 
 
 But there are some signs beginning to 
 appear, even to the public eye, which tend 
 to shake this confidence. It is the very 
 central and vital things that are now 
 flung into the crucible. Religious belief, 
 even in the churches, becomes so fluid that 
 many sections of the people live in chronic 
 doubt if there is firm ground at all. 
 Women revolt. Youth revolts. Capital 
 revolts. Labour has wakened up to 
 a sense of insurgent solidarity which 
 threatens national dissolution. It has 
 become possessed of a powerful social ex- 
 plosive before experience or responsibility 
 has taught it how to handle it, or bred a 
 public spirit, as distinct from a class. 
 And, if it is mishandled, it is of a nature, 
 from its position and function in society, 
 to cause not only damage but wreck. 
 
THE AGE'S UNCREATING WORD 5 
 
 (And so it is also with the central, car- 
 dinal institution of natural society — mar- 
 riage. In every age, of course, it has been 
 morally violated, but it is now ethically 
 challenged. And there are forms of the 
 challenge more dangerous than violation, 
 because they claim moral support. It is 
 one thing to confess ourselves too weak 
 or wayward to keep an ideal which we 
 yet recognise as a law, and it is another 
 to challenge the ideal itself. It is one 
 thing to have to do with a man who sins 
 but says, ' I know it is wrong ' ; it is 
 another thing to have to do with one who 
 sins boldly in the exercise of what he 
 believes to be a right, not to say an 
 apostolate. And to-day it is the moral 
 ideal of marriage that is challenged, and 
 challenged by people who would not break 
 its laws if they recognised them, but who 
 have a mission to dissolve them J 
 
 What we have to do with, therefore, is 
 not vice, but the error that ends in vice : 
 
 V 
 
6 THE AGE'S UNCREATING WORD 
 
 the vice that begins less in passion than 
 in heresy, but which is perhaps even more 
 fatal to society in the far end, because 
 it is believed to be right. Evil becomes 
 our good, and purity plays with perdition. 
 
 The traditional view of marriage is 
 challenged by many who, though they 
 concede too much to the fickleness of 
 passion, are in a totally different category 
 from the swarms of blue-bottles that 
 hover immune upon social garbage. It is 
 perhaps not from such foul vice that 
 society is in most danger. That is deadly 
 for weak or gross individuals. But so- 
 ciety is most affected by the people who 
 care for purity ; and it is in most peril, 
 therefore, from decent heresy rather than 
 palpable vice — from social heresy, heresy 
 as to what constitutes purity, from false 
 theories of a subject more vital than any 
 other to social welfare and cohesion. It 
 is not a region where theory is academic 
 
THE AGE'S UNCREATING WORD 7 
 
 and indifferent. The most serious danger 
 is from critical Idealists, who would dis- 
 solve the traditional view of the sanctity 
 of marriage under the belief that its 
 fixity is a premium on hypocrisy, and 
 that they are exalting and purifying it. 
 They would do so by making it more 
 free. They have imbibed the modern 
 tendency to reduce self-restraint. They 
 are neither vicious nor gross (though they 
 are sometimes recalcitrant and anti-social 
 in temper) ; but they often fail in two 
 respects. They play into the hands of 
 the vicious, because they fail to protest 
 as they should against the exploitation of 
 their views by people who have none of 
 their idealism. And they fail, through a 
 lack of imagination that often goes with 
 obsession by an idea, to follow out the 
 action of their principles, and to forecast 
 the consequences of their views when 
 these shall have become a social creed. 
 
MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, 
 SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL, 
 AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 rr^HE marriage question is so great 
 that it has many aspects. Three 
 might be selected in chief — as it concerns 
 the pair, as it concerns society, as it con- 
 cerns God. There are those who say, 
 or who are tempted to say, that it concerns 
 none but themselves. There are others 
 who say it also concerns society, but no 
 more. And there are those who think 
 that these two views do not exhaust the 
 situation, and that the chief factor is the 
 reference to God and His will.^ In the 
 first case marriage is treated as a mere 
 
 matter of private consent, and it is justi- 
 
 11 
 
12 MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, 
 
 fied by the mere mutual passion, which 
 says to society, ' This is our business and 
 none of yours.' In the second case it is 
 a matter of contract, under the State, 
 because society is so much affected by 
 it that it claims the right to be consulted 
 in it, and to give public sanction. In the 
 third case it is a matter of religion, under 
 the Church, which brings its divine sancti- 
 fication. 
 
 Now I do not think that many who are 
 beyond the erotic stage, when passion is its 
 own guide, or the egoist, where individual 
 rights are supreme, and where everything 
 is sacrificed to liberty, and nothing sacred 
 from it — beyond these, perhaps, not many 
 would defend the first position. Those 
 who claim individual freedom have always 
 to appeal to society for protection in its 
 enjoyment. They live securely only by 
 a social consent. And, still more, f the 
 consequences of marriage are so grave 
 and wide for society that it never can 
 
SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS 13 
 
 be confined to the interests of the pair 
 concerned. It has enormous results for 
 the pubHc : first, in its effect on the moral 
 personality of the parties, and their con- 
 tribution to the social tone ; and, second, 
 in respect of the offspring and their social 
 education, f That is to say, marriage 
 cannot be confined to the affections of 
 the married, but it is involved in the 
 whole ethic, welfare, and dignity of the 
 community. J| 
 
 That is, again (putting it in another 
 way), the prime concern is not the liberty 
 of the individual, or the couple, con- 
 cerned ; it is not private, but social ; it 
 is the interest of the family. It is the 
 family, not the individual, that is the 
 unit of society, its ultimate atom or cell, 
 so to say. And it is impossible for 
 society to allow the view that after 
 mutual passion and consent all else is 
 but form, and therefore entirely flexible. 
 That is not ethical at all. It is the mere 
 
14 MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, 
 
 aesthetic or erotic view; which unfortu- 
 nately has great currency, because it is 
 the view which lends itself to literary 
 effect, and this is by way of being a 
 literary age. 
 
 The inference from this plea is what 
 many draw, that the form should cease 
 or change when the passion that set it up 
 ebbs or fails. This seems to mean that 
 love has no tie, that permanent fidelity 
 is not essential to union; which would 
 then rest rather on the free concourse of 
 passion or liking, and not on the relation of 
 love with a moral nature* But no society 
 can permanently rest on the mere free- 
 dom of its individuals or preferences. 
 Some form, some inhibition, is part of 
 its reality, however it may vary. It is 
 the merest abstraction to sever them and 
 declare that either is indifferent. 
 
 In the same way people say, in a kindred 
 region, " If I have the religious, or the 
 Christian, spirit, it does not matter in 
 
SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS 15 
 
 what form of belief that is cast." But 
 no religious society could live on such 
 Atomism. Certainly a great human society 
 like the Church could not. The form of 
 belief, with good men, may vary for 
 different ages, but it is never indifferent. 
 A common Belief is variable, but essential. 
 And so with the other great human society 
 of the State. It also has its practical 
 dogmas. It could not allow people who 
 use its advantages and claim its pale to 
 say, ' Your forms are entirely at the mercy 
 of our fancy.' 
 
 y It is only when marriage passes beyond 
 mere consent that it becomes an ethical 
 matter. Only then is it moralised. It 
 becomes a matter of the family, of kinship, 
 and therefore of the State. Indeed it 
 becomes a matter of human society a^: 
 large, which must always bar unions that 
 do not conform to the conditions of its 
 welfare and wait on its consent. Marriage 
 is a social act. The social form is not 
 
16 MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, 
 
 indifferent. It is part of the substance. 
 It is a piece of social morality, i,e, of 
 social existence. It is bound up with 
 the safety, honour, and welfare of society. ^ 
 
 But it is to be hoped we shall never 
 come to mere civil marriage, as if it only 
 concerned society. If anything is ethical 
 on that universal scale, it has alreadv 
 begun to be more than ethical. On that 
 wide scale, and on such an intimate 
 subject, it becomes also deep and sacred, 
 it becomes religious. Even if you own 
 no more than the religion of Humanity 
 that is so. You cannot treat human 
 society as one whole without your ethic 
 becoming religious. Even the Positivists, 
 since they worship Humanity, treat mar- 
 riage in their religious ritual as a sacra- 
 ment. And I do not wonder that the 
 Roman Church treats it so. I do not agree 
 with that Church in so doing, for reasons 
 which would be misplaced here. All I 
 
SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS 17 
 
 do say is that the more one ponders the 
 solemn implicates and slow effects of 
 marriage, moral and spiritual, the more 
 one feels that it has something sacramental 
 in its nature. It may be less than a 
 church sacrament, but it is a moral ; it is 
 certainly more than a contract. 
 
 We all know that there are marriages 
 whose slow effect is to deepen and enrich 
 religion on both sides ; while on the other 
 hand there are cases where the effect has 
 been, on one of the parties at least, to 
 weaken or to quench the religion in 
 which they began. If not a sacrament, 
 it is a means of grace; and, like every 
 means of grace, it sweetens or hardens 
 according as it is used. 
 
 At any rate the ethical and social view 
 
 of marriage is quite inadequate, even 
 
 if Humanity be all we have in view ; 
 
 how much more when we have in view 
 
 the God of Humanity ? It calls for 
 
 more than social sanction — it calls for 
 2 
 
18 MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, 
 
 divine sanctification, if life do so at all. If 
 it means so much for the soul and for 
 society, that is really because it belongs to 
 the Kingdom of God, to the will of the God 
 ' Who ordered society and its destiny. If it 
 is organic to the structure of society, it is 
 vital to the purpose of God. It is a union 
 which reflects a union deep in the eternal 
 nature of a triune God Himself. Hence if 
 religion has a place in the institution of 
 marriage, its proper place is supreme. 
 Wherever it has a place, it has the ruling 
 place by right. It has not only to add a 
 benignant blessing to a natural institution, 
 but it has the right to rule it and moralise 
 it, govern it and lift it up, as it has the 
 right to rule every great juncture of life. 
 Is it any use beating about the bush 
 here ? When we speak of religion, do 
 we not at heart mean the Christian 
 religion, as gathering up all that is best 
 in the rest ? Again I say I do not want 
 to raise theological issues. I do not ask 
 
SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS 19 
 
 what the exact relation of Christianity 
 
 mf 
 
 is to other reh'gions, or to what is called 
 natural religion, nor in what sense it is 
 unique. I only say it is in a real relation 
 to them, and one which makes the most 
 and best of them, and reveals the 
 working of God in them all. If there is 
 a religious view of life and of marriage 
 therefore, it must be the Christian view, 
 substantially and in the long run. 
 
 And I will take another step — it must 
 be substantially the view of the Church. 
 By which I do not necessarily mean what 
 has traditionally been the view of the 
 Church. Nor necessarily the view of a 
 particular section of the Church. But the 
 whole Church of confessing Christians has 
 the only right to say what Christianity 
 is or should be. It is the company of 
 the soul's experts ; that is, the experients 
 of the Gospel and the Spirit. So, by 
 the Church's view I mean the form which 
 the Church's principle may come, on the 
 
 y 
 
20 MARRIAGE AS INDIVIDUAL, 
 
 whole, to take when we examine, in 
 the h'ght of an instructed faith, both the 
 Gospel and the modern situation, when we 
 review all the questions raised about the 
 ethic of the past in the presence neither 
 of passion nor of tradition alone, but of the 
 changed social conditions and distresses. 
 For the present challenge of marriage has 
 largely a social cause in the conditions 
 of the great city and its industry. 
 
 And again I do not m.ean that the 
 Church has the right to force its law 
 upon the State. Much of the prejudice 
 against religion has been caused by the 
 impression that the Church, in pressing 
 its views, is seeking to coerce the public 
 for the sake of its own power and place. 
 Too often it has been so ; but I am sure all 
 that is best in the churches would unite 
 in confessing as their ruling idea that of 
 service. If the Church oppose any move- 
 ment, it should only be in obedience to 
 a trust committed to it, and in the defence 
 
SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS 21 
 
 of a principle put in its charge. No 
 coercion, no lust of power. And let us 
 escape from mawkish charity to remember 
 that sometimes the best service you can 
 render men is to combat their errors. 
 
 Three things should be clear in this 
 connection. 
 
 1. The Church has no right absolutely 
 to forbid the State to modify the con- 
 ditions of divorce according to the ex- 
 pediencies of the whole practical situation. 
 
 2. The Church has a right to make and 
 keep its own marriage laws, and it 
 ought to be in no position where it cannot 
 do so. Civil marriage is compulsory, 
 but religious is optional, and it need not 
 be used by those who refuse the con- 
 ditions. 
 
 3. From the Church's point of view, 
 and speaking generally, the chief way to 
 deal with the admitted evils is not legal 
 but moral, not to relax requirement but 
 to increase power. True Christian faith 
 
22 INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL, RELIGIOUS 
 
 has resources of power which obviate the 
 need of divorce. Between two people 
 confessing Christ and serving Him in the 
 Spirit, divorce is unthinkable, and neither 
 Christ nor Paul contemplates it. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF 
 MARRIAGE 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MARRIAGE 
 
 TF it were said by any that religion 
 and the Church have little to do 
 with marriage, it is impossible to say that 
 Christ had little to do with it. It would 
 be nearer historic truth to say that the 
 subject almost fascinated Him. He was 
 not a social reformer nor a political 
 liberator (though nothing has been such 
 a power in both directions as His Gospel). 
 And yet He had very much to say of a 
 most positive kind about the keystone of 
 society, marriage. He said it so strongly 
 and positively, that most people have 
 thought He was actually legislating about 
 it. But He was not a legislator either. He 
 was not engrossed with its effect and value 
 for natural society ; as is shown by the fact 
 
 25 
 
26 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 that, when He speaks of its permanence or 
 its breach, He says nothing in the interest 
 of the children, which is so vital to the 
 social aspect of the case. He thinks of 
 it theologically, not sociologically, as an 
 expression of the will of God for His 
 Kingdom, and not as a piece of natural 
 social ethic. (For the Kingdom of God is 
 not a thing, not a particular social fabric, 
 but a certain common relation to Him.) 
 If He had thought of it chiefly as a piece 
 of general ethic, He would have been much 
 more specific about it, considering the 
 immense stress He laid upon it. But 
 He treats it only in relation to the Jewish 
 forms of it that were before Him and His 
 public. If Jesus was a legislator, Christi- 
 anity must be monkery or Tolstoiism. 
 
 A great part of the suspicion and hatred 
 towards His Church has arisen from its 
 mistake in thinking that His principle 
 for His ideal Kingdom was legislation for 
 general society. But He was not legislat- 
 
OF MARRIAGE 27 
 
 ing even for His Church ; which is not 
 identical with the Kingdom any more 
 than with natural society, and which 
 did not yet exist. And if He was not 
 legislating, the Church has much freedom 
 in applying His great principles to a 
 particular age and stage. But His ideal 
 principle is very clear. He was arrested 
 upon this idea of marriage, and upon 
 what I have called the sacramental signi- 
 ficance of it. He was the legatee of the 
 great spiritual tradition of His nation, 
 which (with great tenderness often) re- 
 garded the national relation to God as 
 wedlock, and treated public apostasy as 
 adultery. (Marriage was the point where 
 God most closely touched man, so far as 
 social ordinances were concerned ; just 
 as Christ Himself was that point so far 
 as the soul was concerned. We see then 
 how little wonderful it is when Paul treats 
 Christian marriage as the great natural 
 and social symbol of Christ. Paul's ideal 
 
28 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 attitude was but the continuation of 
 Christ's own. And it was slowly revolu- 
 tionary for the world's idea of marriage^^. 
 
 I cannot go into much detail as to the 
 Christian view of marriage, nor at all into 
 its spiritual symbolism of Christ's relation 
 to His Church. I am more concerned with 
 the Christian ethic of it as an institution 
 for men than with its spiritual suggestive- 
 ness in our relation to God. It must be 
 clear that the Church, as the trustee of the 
 Gospel, is bound always to have much 
 to say, and especially to its own members, 
 on the subject. And to repudiate its 
 every interference as a piece of ecclesias- 
 tical intrusion is mere journalese. 
 
 I will only mention the chief points 
 of the Christian position. 
 
 1. Christian marriage is monogamy 
 Polygamy, in principle, and as an 
 institution, is licentious. I say nothing 
 of practice in particular cases. There 
 
OF MARRIAGE 29 
 
 is, of course, the ready remark that in the 
 Old Testament polygamy was permitted 
 and practised, even to the extent that 
 it was not wholly extirpated in Christ's 
 time. And the one and final reply is 
 this : The entire drift, and, you might 
 almost say, a leading purpose, of the 
 Bible history is to show that, when we 
 read the cases in the context of the whole, 
 its consequences are not only unsocial, 
 but disastrous and tragic. It is always 
 shown by the event (though the Bible 
 does not lecture about it) to be a family 
 bane, the source of sin, crime, and ruin. 
 Polygamy is fatal to moral development, 
 family life, and social peace. It is semi- 
 barbaric. It means the slavery of woman. 
 And it has its ground either rudely as 
 legalising lust, or crudely as providing 
 population. One need hardly discuss poly- 
 gamy in this country, except for the fact 
 that it comes back upon us in another 
 form — in the successive, instead of the 
 
30 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 simultaneous, form of temporary mar- 
 riage. Of which more anon. 
 
 The plea is urged sometimes that poly- 
 gamy in any kind is the natural thing, 
 and that a monogamous restriction is 
 unnatural, and artificial^ and unreal. 
 But there are no words in which we need 
 more education than those that deal with 
 the natural or the real. What do you 
 mean by natural ? Do you mean instinc- 
 tive and primitive, or evolutionary and 
 civilised ? Have you grasped the mean- 
 ing of evolution for nature ? If you 
 mean by natural what is the original form, 
 of course that is polygamy, not to say 
 promiscuity. But to go back to the 
 brute is not to be natural. The doctrine 
 of evolution has knocked on the head 
 those social theories which began by 
 imagining an aboriginal state of nature 
 and went on striving back to it, either as 
 it was in Eden or anywhere else. 
 
OF MARRIAGE 31 
 
 The natural is what corresponds with 
 the line and tendency of evolution, of 
 civilisation ; the unnatural is what 
 thwarts that process. And the whole 
 natural history of society has been the 
 process of evolution, by a costly struggle, 
 from conditions polygamous to conditions 
 monogamous. And we may take it as 
 a social dogma that the welfare of any 
 community is bound up essentially with 
 the canonisation of monogamous marriage. 
 Monogamy is the index of civilisation. 
 That is the true nature of society, the 
 nature which, through all its history, has 
 been working to the top, where civili- 
 sation, through Christianity, has now 
 fixed it. 
 
 Monogamy is not a mere social con- 
 vention. Even if it were but that, it would 
 still be of the greatest value and authority. 
 It represents the upward struggle of 
 millenniums in the civilisation of the race, 
 
32 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 a struggle so great and stubborn that it 
 is not at an end yet, even in our Western 
 civilisation. Prostitution is the lees and 
 dregs of polygamy. But monogamy is 
 more than a social achievement. It rests 
 on a deep and commanding moral base. 
 The material side of love is real enough, 
 it is imperious enough, and it has of 
 course its proper place and sacramental 
 value for true love. But that place and 
 value is one which must retire more and 
 more to the rear as love grows more and 
 more love. By the very course of nature 
 it does in age. When true love is once 
 set alight, the flame, or the beauty, may 
 go out that kindled it. The material base 
 is more and more mastered by the moral 
 and spiritual fellowship, by the real com- 
 munion of heart and soul which is the 
 great personal purpose of marriage. 
 
 The purpose of love's union is the 
 mutual and practical culture of character 
 in all fine and intimate moral growth. 
 
OF MARRIAGE S3 
 
 Without this the sensuous side, in any 
 personahty which rises above the brutes 
 by having a moral nature and destiny, 
 is mere sin. What follows ? Surely this, 
 that love may not be spent on the opposite 
 sex as a sex. That would justify the 
 widest and wildest licence. It can only 
 be morally spent on a single personality. 
 For each the other is the sex in this 
 regard. Only so is moral culture by its 
 means possible. Multitude makes soul- 
 communion and moral interaction im- 
 possible. It means debasement. And 
 the ethic which sings of a Don Juan as 
 being false to every woman but always 
 true to love, is literary blackguardism. 
 
 The same principle prescribes also the 
 lifelong permanence of marriage. All re- 
 lations which are but temporary in their 
 nature defy, in various degrees, the prin- 
 ciple that passion is there for the uses 
 and ideals of the moral soul. And such 
 
 relations are a crime against an ideal 
 8 
 
S4 CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MARRIAGE 
 
 Humanity no less than a holy God. A 
 complete Humanity rests on men and 
 women who do not simply fuse in passion, 
 but who grow into each other in sacrifice 
 as only souls can. And that again rests 
 on a moral equality of the sexes, which is 
 possible only if they are not identical 
 but complementary. The rights are equal 
 but not the same. Man and wife are one 
 flesh as one spiritual personality; one 
 not by an outward bond or promise 
 merely, but by each being the other's 
 inner complement. They interpenetrate. 
 They make up a joint personality by the 
 harmony of an indelible psychic differ- 
 ence. And this dual, or complex, person- 
 ality (the family idea) is the base of the 
 corporate unity of society. And it is the 
 point of attachment for those great 
 spiritual analogies which connect Christ 
 so intimately with a human society in the 
 Church. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF 
 MARRIAGE — continued 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MARRIAGE 
 
 CONTINUED 
 
 2. Christian marriage is indissoluble 
 
 TTERE the Christian law, in so far as 
 it is a law, and in so far as the 
 ideal society of Christ is concerned, is 
 absolute. I more than doubt if the ex- 
 ception imbedded in Christ's words about 
 divorce is genuine. The whole tone of 
 the Sermon on the Mount is absolute, and 
 does not deal in exceptions. It does not 
 touch the region of casuistry. The ex- 
 ception is mentioned only in Matthew. 
 And moreover, as Christ was speaking of 
 His ideal Kingdom, He could not think 
 of TTopveCa there, and therefore could not 
 except it. The point is a difficult one, 
 
 37 
 
88 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 however ; and, if we took a text alone to 
 settle the question, we could not be 
 dogmatic. We could not dogmatise 
 morally (as society does about marriage) 
 on the basis of a fine point of criticism. 
 
 If, however, infidelity were a ground 
 for divorce, it is not the only ground. 
 St. Paul allows it for malicious desertion 
 by a Pagan spouse (1 Cor. vii. 15). And 
 it should, for Christians, be equally a 
 ground on both sides, having regard to 
 the spiritual equality secured by Christ 
 for the woman on grounds which are at 
 the mercy of no texts. That, of course, is 
 not in Christ's express teaching, which, 
 here as elsewhere, moves formally in the 
 lines of Oriental jurisprudence or custom, 
 and does not sjDcak of the woman's rights. 
 But it is in Christ's principle and Gospel. 
 The case of slavery is analogous. The 
 New Testament does not destroy it, but 
 its Gospel does. So Christ did not say the 
 Oriental position of the woman in marriage 
 
OF MARRIAGE 39 
 
 was slavery, but He destroyed it. And, 
 another thing : the more you make mar- 
 riage indissoluble, the more you must 
 press the Christian duty of forgiveness for 
 lapse, and of restoration, unless the sin 
 become a habit ; then separation, whether 
 divorce or not. 
 
 But the chief practical ground for the 
 indissolubility of marriage among the 
 people of Christ is this, that Christianity 
 opens moral resources which enable men 
 and women to overcome the difficulties 
 and disillusions of married life. The 
 Church law of divorce ought to be more 
 exigent than the State's, because the 
 Church provides more resources for avert- 
 ing it, and it can never be but an extreme 
 step when all else has failed. For, even 
 in the fading of young passion, even amid 
 some disillusion, the relation ripens to be- 
 come a very intimate aspect of Christian 
 love. Christianity provides for its true 
 disciples a resource whereby Christian love 
 
40 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 so schools the character and temper that, 
 when the romance is gone that played too 
 great a part, a kmdly life is possible still, 
 in which indeed a new and deeper affection 
 may grow up. That happens in nature 
 for the children's sake ; where there are 
 no children it should happen in grace for 
 Christ's sake. 
 
 And if the growth of wickedness on 
 one side went so far that there was 
 nothing but separation for it, then the 
 same spiritual resource is at our disposal, 
 if we will, to make solitude tolerable, 
 however hard. In a truly Christian 
 Church there would be means of much 
 alleviating the solitude. The precepts 
 of Christ, especially in the Sermon, were 
 for those who had such resources, es- 
 pecially in Himself ; and they were not 
 for those who stood no higher than the 
 moral plane of the public or the State. 
 The Church, therefore, cannot be so lax 
 here as the State. 
 
OF MARRIAGE 41 
 
 Moses, the statesman, permitted divorce 
 because of the hardness of the pubHc / 
 heart. That phrase does not mean heart- / 
 lessness, nor what we mean by hardness, 
 i,e. brutahty of feehng, nor overt hostihty 
 to God and His rule. That was not 
 Israel's case. It means moral backward- 
 ness, an inferior stage of moral culture. 
 In this respect what is possible to a 
 constitutional state, where law represents 
 the moral average and not the moral 
 aristocracy, is always behind the principle 
 of the spiritual society. So long as 
 natural egoism and self-pleasing is un- 
 broken, the indissolubility of marriage 
 cannot be carried out. Burdens greater 
 than the bearing power make ruin. The 
 absolute indissolubility of marriage is a 
 principle only in the region of Christian 
 obedience and Christian power. Christian 
 ethic is not possible without a common 
 Christian faith ; and for such faith there is 
 no other ethic. Indissolubility is only the 
 
42 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 principle of the society whose existence 
 is obedience to Christ, and of that society, 
 moreover, in the ideal and exigent stage 
 in which Christ always saw it — as in 
 children He beheld their angel and 
 destiny ever before the Father's face. 
 
 The ethic of the Church must always 
 seem exacting to the ethic of the State. 
 And the Church must keep its ideal clear, 
 if it is to educate the State in such matters, 
 even at the cost of seeming to be some- 
 what stiff. The State must be popular, 
 the Church need not, and often must 
 not. The standard of the State is not 
 the standard of the Church ; and neither 
 part has the right to force its standard 
 directly on the other. The Church cer- 
 tainly ought to be in no position which 
 compels it to accept the lower standard 
 of the courts. And, of course, it ought 
 in all circumstances to refuse to marry 
 again the offender of a divorced pair. 
 
 But I shall be asked about the treat- 
 
OF MARRIAGE 43 
 
 ment of the injured party in the case. 
 That makes a great difficulty from the 
 Church's point of view. Christ says 
 nothing about the injured party any more 
 than He does about the children ; which 
 shows that He was not legislating, but 
 illustrating a moral ideal. He does not 
 say, ' It is my will that marriage in my 
 Kingdom should be indissoluble.' He says 
 that the spiritual conditions of His ideal 
 Kingdom are such that the dissolution of 
 marriage is never called for. The solvent 
 influences are either not there, or, if they 
 arise, they are submerged and transmuted 
 by Christian love. The conditions of 
 divorce do not exist in His Kingdom. He 
 was not legislating, as I insist. No legis- 
 lator could ignore such large factors in 
 the case as the children especially. And the 
 Church found it could not, as soon as it 
 began to legislate on the family very 
 early in its career. 
 
 As Christ Himself taught once from a 
 
44 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 child, so the children became His means 
 of teaching the Church what marriage 
 should be in practice. The interests of the 
 children implied much about the parents 
 and their marriage, and they corrected 
 much in the conception of marriage where 
 isolated and literalised dicta misled. Cer- 
 tain passages of Paul, for instance, make 
 such correction. In the interests of the 
 children the casuistry of the Church had 
 to both keep and modify the absoluteness 
 of Christ's ideal. And, moreover, all the 
 New Testament regulations were conceived 
 under the influence of the expected and 
 near parousia, when all existing relations 
 should be dissolved. 
 
 Considering, further, that Christ's words 
 referred only to arbitrary dismissal by 
 the man, and not to the solemn decision of 
 a court of justice (which did not exist for 
 such cases), they should no more be applied 
 to that decision than " Swear not " applies 
 to oaths in court, or " Thou shalt not 
 
OP MARRIAGE 45 
 
 kill *' to judicial executions. We have 
 three grades of moral attainment — the 
 State, the Church, and the Kingdom of 
 God; and what Christ had. in view was 
 the Kingdom, and the ideal Kingdom, 
 which in both State and Church was but 
 in the making. It was only in the ideal 
 Kingdom, or under such individual re- 
 lation to Himself as should one day be 
 universal in the Kingdom, that the spiritual 
 conditions were present which made 
 marriage absolutely permanent till it was 
 absorbed in the divine purpose. 
 
 I should therefore find it very hard 
 to refuse as a minister to re-marry the 
 innocent party. And I should find one 
 line of guidance in another part of Christ's 
 teaching. A second marriage after the 
 death of the other partner is not forbidden, 
 either by Christ, or the Apostles, or the 
 Church. What Christ says about the 
 relations of the married in the other 
 world seems to refer not to the continu- 
 
46 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 ance, but only to the exclusiveness of the 
 relation. That, He taught, ceased, though 
 all relation did not. The exclusiveness 
 of the relation ceased ; and that is what 
 infidelity destroys. What is destroyed by 
 infidelity is that which is also destroyed 
 by death — the exclusiveness. The rela- 
 tion itself could only be totally destroyed 
 by complete oblivion, which is impossible 
 in either case if moral growth is to go on 
 in another life at all. Hence, if the 
 second marriage of the survivor is lawful 
 after death, it is similarly lawful to the 
 moral survivor after the other's death 
 by infidelity and divorce. 
 
 Could the Church recognise a civil 
 divorce for other reasons than infidelity, 
 say for incompatibility ? On the whole, 
 no. But the difficulty is immense, having 
 regard to the fact that there is no sharp 
 line that man can draw between Church 
 and world, and that in all the churches 
 there are multitudes on the lower level. 
 
OF MARRIAGE 47 
 
 which must be treated with some reference 
 to its moral power. For the ideal Church, 
 where all are in complete relation with 
 Christ and filled with the Spirit, marriage of 
 course is indissoluble. Divorce is always 
 a confession of defective Christianity. But 
 we are not at that high stage. The nation 
 certainly is not, as we have had to recognise. 
 But the Church also is not. The actual 
 Church is not. The Church is not yet 
 the Kingdom. The hardness of heart, the 
 moral backwardness, is not confined to a 
 churchless public. And it is mere purism 
 to act as if it were. The whole Church 
 (like the Christian personality itself) is but 
 being made ; and the same is true of the 
 ideal marriage even within the Church. 
 
 Within the Church we have to deal 
 with moral conditions far short of the 
 ideal (but certain) consummation of the 
 Kingdom of God, which I have said and 
 not any actual church, was in Christ's 
 eye as He spoke. And the steps to reach 
 
\J 
 
 48 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 it, at each growing stage, were at the dis- 
 cretion of the Spirit, which guides the 
 Church in the wisest way to that end. 
 Perfect Christian marriages may be few, 
 but they are prophetic. And what is 
 required at any stage is that nothing be 
 done to surrender the ideal principle, and 
 everything which on the whole promotes 
 it. That cannot always be done by a 
 non possumus. 
 
 Within the Christian pale there are 
 many degrees of spiritual attainment and 
 moral culture. And what is called for 
 is not an iron law, which is not congenial 
 to any idealism, or any nurture, but a 
 principle which, with a changeless flexi- 
 bility, has in itself the power also to 
 educate men up to itself. It has to be 
 opportunist in order to make itself in the 
 end absolute — so long as it is educative, 
 preserves its identity in its condescension, 
 and does not vanish in mere opportunism. 
 I speak of another than a mere tactical op- 
 
OF MARRIAGE 4§ 
 
 portunism. I mean the opportunism of 
 sympathy which goes lovingly down, not 
 to stay down, but to lift up — the oppor- 
 tunism in which Christ emptied and 
 humbled Himself in the Incarnation. The 
 ideal principle rears the ideal community, 
 and issues from its ideal Head. 
 
 Paul did not feel prevented, in dealing 
 with his infant churches, from meeting 
 the actual situation in a casuist way ; 
 in doing which he allows a freedom that 
 Christ was not called on expressly to name 
 — though Paul also spoke about marriage, 
 the Church, and Christ, things so lofty as 
 we find in Ephesians. He had to deal 
 with actual cases, with what would now 
 be called mixed marriages, between a 
 Christian and a Pagan. And he allows 
 deliberate desertion to be a ground of free- 
 dom there (1 Cor. vii. 9), though he did not 
 as between two Christians. Paul had to 
 legislate for the Church as Christ had not 
 4 
 
50 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 — for special cases in it at least. And 
 he uses the flexibility of the spirit and 
 not the stiffness of the letter. He was 
 not preaching sub specie eternitatis, but 
 acting as a casuist — episcopally and not 
 apostolically . And so the Church at every 
 historic stage must act — spiritually, flex- 
 ibly, justly, with no infallibility in the 
 application, but only in the principle. 
 
 To-day also the Church has to decide 
 how to apply Christ's principle in a 
 Pauline way. It has to decide, the pastor 
 may be any day called to decide, if he will 
 marry the innocent and suffering party 
 of a divorced pair, where the conduct of 
 the other has put him outside the Chris- 
 tian pale, and shown him to be a Pagan 
 and, worse, an apostate. And I am 
 bound to say, so far as my judgment goes, 
 that, while I am not, of course, bound to 
 marry anybody, and am free to be guided 
 by the circumstances of particular cases 
 after due inquiry, I do not feel that, as a 
 
OF MARRIAGE 51 
 
 minister of the Church, I am prohibited 
 from complying with the request. I none 
 the less respect the scruples of those who 
 feel they are forbidden. 
 
 In any case divorce is an extreme, a con- 
 fession of failure, and everything possible 
 must first have been tried. The one thing 
 is that the Church should only make such 
 concessions as keep its ideal clear and let 
 it act slowly on the public. Every con- 
 cession has to be in the final interest of 
 the Christian ideal, and not merely of the 
 public convenience. And the question is 
 whether the only means of doing so is 
 for the Church to set its face against 
 divorce in all circumstances, or whether the 
 witness can be faithfully borne amidst a 
 certain degree of practical flexibility. The 
 answer differentiates two great conceptions 
 of the Church. One thing is certain, 
 the Church could not agree to recognise 
 divorce by consent. That would be allow- 
 ing the parties to be judges in their own 
 
52 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 case. And it would practically introduce 
 temporary marriage, and reduce it to con- 
 cubinage. To that point I must return. 
 
 On the whole, probably the Church 
 should stiffen the ideal as the State relaxes 
 practice in this matter of divorce. It is 
 quite possible that good utilitarian reasons 
 should be shown for some careful extension 
 of legal divorce. That is for the public 
 and for Parliament, at their own moral 
 level. But every such step confesses that 
 we are, protanto, not a Christain nation. 
 And the Church must be free to live by 
 her own Lord, her own light, and her own 
 principles in the matter, (See p. 54.) 
 
 There is a difficulty in the way of state 
 relaxation which many feel, and which 
 has been pressed on me by an eminent 
 prelate. We have raised the State to a 
 certain approximation to the Christian 
 moral ideal ; are we to allow it, even to 
 encourage it, to go back by extending 
 
OF MARRIAGE 53 
 
 facilities for divorce ? The answer is two- 
 fold. First, that the State may have been 
 led to legislate by Church ideals ahead of 
 the moral resources with which the Church 
 has supplied it, and therefore the present 
 law may do more harm in causing illicit 
 unions than it would do in dissolving the 
 licit. The retreat would be strategic. 
 Or second, if the law was not ahead of 
 the moral sense of the voters of its day, 
 society has gone back. Our moral educa- 
 tion has not kept pace with the growth of 
 civilisation, and the law is inadequate to 
 the moral conditions that prevail now. 
 You can keep down the number of 
 divorces, but perhaps at the cost of in- 
 creasing married misery and demoral- 
 isation, to the great damage of family 
 and society. 
 
 Especially have we changed in this 
 respect, that we can no longer treat 
 Christ's precepts as imperious social legis- 
 lation for the public, nor even as legisla- 
 
54 CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MARRIAGE 
 
 tion for a Church, which did not then 
 exist; but they must be regarded as 
 guidance for those who fulfilled their 
 conditions by such a personal relation to 
 Him as makes a true Church. " All 
 men cannot receive this saying, only 
 those to whom it is given." And given 
 them not merely by nature, but by the 
 Holy Spirit's effect in their spiritual 
 power. 
 
 In all this I feel how much easier it 
 would be to dogmatise on a word of 
 Christ's than to apply the changeless 
 principle of His Gospel with His wisdom 
 to the actual moral situation of each hour. 
 
 *;^* Note to p. 52. So long, that is, as an Established 
 Church do not punish with social ostracism those whom 
 it cannot repel from Communion for obeying the law of 
 the land. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF 
 MARRIAGE — continued 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MAR- 
 RIAGE CONTINUED 
 
 3. As Ethical {the Object of Marriage) 
 
 A S to the object of marriage, nobody, 
 when contemplating marriage, 
 ought to be thinking about its object. 
 That would be a piece of pedantry. 
 People marry because they must, not 
 because they should ; because they like 
 each other, and not because they owe a 
 duty to the public, or even to the ideal. 
 I do not offer advice to those about to 
 marry, or those who want to marry. We 
 are discussing an institution, not John 
 or Elizabeth — though I confess, in the 
 by-going, I find John and Elizabeth more 
 
 67 
 
58 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 interesting than institutions which are 
 more valuable. 
 
 We are asking what is the function 
 of marriage in the order of things. If 
 we looked no wider or deeper than the 
 elementary necessities of the State, we 
 should say it was to provide population, 
 to carry on both the nation and the race. 
 But men and women are much more than 
 pawns in the State. A man is much 
 more than a case of the race ; he is not 
 like a single copy of a book, whose damage 
 or destruction would not affect the book 
 at all. And the most populous state, 
 were it on no higher level than population, 
 would only mean multitudinous degener- 
 acy, a " populous No." 
 
 We have to face the question why the 
 
 race should go on, and to meet it with a 
 
 / moral answer. Both State and family 
 
 i are there for moral objects. All the 
 
 great institutions of society are there 
 
 in the long run for the development 
 
OF MARRIAGE 59 
 
 of moral personality. And marriage es- 
 pecially has this for its end — the educa- 
 tion of the moral soul, private and public, 
 the production of a race worth multi- 
 plying. To marry for that purpose is 
 priggery. If marriage has not that effect, 
 it is a failure. 
 
 Marriage is there for the conquest of 
 that elemental egoism which is such a 
 useful servant and such a fatal master. 
 In plainer language, but less exact, it is 
 there to educate people out of their 
 native selfishness and impatience. Not 
 that it has that effect on all, though it is 
 all that some have to do that for them. 
 We can have the egoism of the couple, 
 or of the family. We may have met cases 
 where the members of the family were 
 not serving society, but made a close 
 ring, or a hard ball, in the midst of society 
 and against it. Their object was to lay 
 society under tribute to the family, as 
 far as possible. It was family booty. 
 
60 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 And their conduct had the maternal note 
 of believing, and trying to make others 
 believe, that there was no such family 
 in the world. 
 
 Living for one's own family alone has 
 been said to be no better than living for 
 one's own health. But it is not quite 
 as bad as that. When we have had our 
 amusement out of that spectacle, we 
 should remember that the family affec- 
 tions and prejudices are all that the poor 
 people had between them and absolute 
 egoism. You have Burns, with a judg- 
 ment which goes to a finer form of the 
 extreme, saying : 
 
 *' To make a happy fireside clime 
 For weans and wife — 
 That's the true pathos and sublime 
 Of human life." 
 
 But that is no more true than the other 
 extreme. Life has issues far more grand 
 and moving than domesticity. But if 
 it is an error, it is a very wholesome one. 
 
OF MARRIAGE 61 
 
 There is a lower depth even than famihsm. 
 It is where one member of the family makes 
 even his family tributary to his own 
 egoism ; and he goes out of life having 
 learned nothing from it but that he is a 
 self, and not a mere thing — ^yet only a 
 centripetal self so far, a self whose next 
 stage must be a severe reconstruction on a 
 new centre. Egoism cannot bear egoism. 
 Two of a trade cannot agree. And two 
 egoisms mean one divorce. 
 
 The question is asked, among some of 
 the Socialists for instance, if marriage be 
 a private or a social affair. Some would 
 say of it, as of religion, that it is Privat- 
 sache ; and all that society has to do is 
 to relieve the parents from the care of the 
 children, and to bring these up in public 
 nurseries (which would more properly 
 be described as infantry barracks). But 
 marriage is neither a wholly private nor 
 a wholly public interest. It turns upon 
 personal affection, but (as we have seen) 
 
62 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 it has some of its greatest effects and 
 purposes far beyond personal happiness. 
 Happiness may only be sought under 
 moral conditions. No one has a right 
 to happiness who knows nothing of obe- 
 dience, and cares nothing. No happiness 
 should be without responsibility — latent 
 at least. And especially it is responsible 
 to the society which makes happiness 
 secure by its order and shelter. 
 
 Marriage means family cares. It means 
 the wise sacrifice of the parents to the 
 children, and the wfse service to society 
 of both as a family. The family not 
 only provides citizens, but, what is far 
 more, a school of citizenship. Citizens 
 are made, and not only born. The social 
 question is far greater than the population 
 question. It concerns the moral quality 
 that is reared in the population. And 
 the first school of this is the family. It 
 has to make not simply men, but fellow 
 men. And nothing can do this like family 
 
OF MARRIAGE 63 
 
 life. Homes which are mere firms for 
 the couple, or hotels to the young people, 
 are of less than no social value. They 
 must be centres of moral culture : of cul- 
 ture not in ethics, but in personality, and 
 in its growth by fidelity, service, and sacri- 
 fice. Citizens must be reared by those 
 who contribute them; and that can only 
 be in the moral atmosphere of family life, 
 and not in the unstable climate of mere 
 brotherhoods, nor in the rough and tumble 
 of partisan conflicts or faction fights. 
 
 The children are there not simply to 
 be a motive for family industry as heirs of 
 the family property, but to be worthy 
 agents of social production. They are not 
 legatees of the family estate when it is 
 cut up, but heirs of the best moral culture 
 that family life represents ; a culture 
 that is not cut up as it is multiplied, 
 but is the grand patrimony and growing 
 unity of the race. The child is neither 
 the mere reversionary of the family estate 
 
64 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW 
 
 nor a piece of it. He is a soul entrusted 
 to the family, to the parents especially, 
 to be reared to freedom moral and re- 
 ligious. Maxima debetur pueris reverentia 
 semper. Yes, semper. 
 
 The Fifth Commandment is very neces- 
 sary now, because respect for parents 
 is in decay. But why is it in decay ? 
 Because the commandment has a con- 
 verse. Honour thy boy and girl that 
 f their days may be strong in the land the 
 Lord thy God giveth thee. Parents ought 
 to honour their children, and not merely 
 fondle them, and not merely maintain 
 them, and not merely punish them. Be- 
 cause that aspect of the matter has been 
 neglected, parents need to be taught to 
 honour the child, whom they too often 
 treat with the extremes both of neglect 
 and indulgence, as a nuisance or a darling. 
 Some families would be more valuable if 
 they had more mutual respect, even at 
 the cost of some superfluous affection. 
 
OF MARRIAGE 65 
 
 Considering the effect of marriage on 
 the moral nature both of parents and, 
 especially, of children, it comes home to 
 us that the marriage question is really a 
 part of the education question. Genera- 
 tion and education are morally insepara- 
 able. The parent is the chief moral 
 teacher. The family is not merely a 
 coupler, but a transmitter ; not only a link 
 between the generations, but the living 
 vehicle to the future of all the best moral 
 wisdom which such parentage gathers 
 from the past. It is in our children that 
 the best of all we have been made by 
 experience lives on for the future. 
 
 From the religious point of view the 
 object and effect of marriage is very great 
 and deep. Nothing goes so deep, except 
 contact with Christ Himself, in the shaping 
 and toning of the soul. This takes place! 
 in countless subtle ways, many of them- 
 below the surface of our immediate con- 
 sciousness ; but there come times and 
 5 
 
 / 
 
66 CHRISTIAN VIEW 01^ MARRIAGE 
 
 crises when these subhminal secrets of the 
 heart are revealed. But I do not dwell on 
 that, because it is perhaps more appro- 
 priate to the pulpit, where it might 
 oftener appear. And I have already 
 touched it. 
 
 It might be added here that from this 
 moral standpoint the medieval view of 
 woman was defective, and its chivalry 
 semi-barbarous. It represented an idolatry 
 rather than a service, a passion rather than 
 an affection, an erotic (as I put it) rather 
 than an ethic. And we fmd its hollow 
 interior illustrated in the double morality 
 still found in connection with the medieval 
 survival of militarism, where the treat- 
 ment of one class of women is a sheer 
 Pharisaism compared with that of another. 
 
THE MATTER OF SUBORDI- 
 NATION 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE MATTER OF SUBORDINATION 
 
 TT is impossible to speak of the Chris- 
 tian idea of marriage without taking 
 some note of the woman's subordination 
 which seems to be involved in it, and 
 which is resented by so many. The 
 resentment need not surprise us in an age 
 when revolt has taken the place among 
 the virtues which used to be held by 
 the other extreme of resignation. 
 
 In this connection I would make the 
 following observations. 
 
 1. Our moral principles as Christians 
 
 must flow far less from precepts than 
 
 from the revealed nature of the Christian 
 
 God. Our moral foundations are in the 
 
 holy mountain ; all our springs are in 
 
 69 
 
70 THE MATTER 
 
 Him. Now the nature of that God is 
 Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 Father and Son co-exist, co-equal in the 
 Spirit of holiness, i.e, of perfection. But 
 Father and Son is a relation inconceivable 
 except the Son be obedient to the Father. 
 The perfection of the Son and the per- 
 fecting of His holy work lay, not in His 
 suffering, but in His obedience. And, as 
 He was Eternal Son, it meant an eternal 
 obedience ; for the supreme work of Christ, 
 so completely identified with His person, 
 could not be done by anything which 
 was not as eternal as His person. 
 
 But obedience is not conceivable with- 
 out some form of subordination. Yet in 
 His very obedience the Son was co-equal 
 with the Father ; the Son's yielding will 
 was no less divine than the Father's 
 exigent will. Therefore, in the very nature 
 of God, subordination implies no in- 
 feriority. It is as divine as rule, for it is 
 self-subordination on an infinite scale ; 
 
OF SUBORDINATION 71 
 
 it is not enforced. It is sacrifice, it is 
 not mere resignation. It is no slavery, 
 but willing service. And if man is to 
 be holy as He is holy, our self-subordina- 
 tion to each other is not necessarily in- 
 feriority, nor need obedience be slavery. 
 There is an obedience bound up with 
 the supreme dignity of Christian love, so 
 that where most love is, there also is 
 most obedience. 
 
 So little is it true when Kant says that 
 for moral purposes it is indifferent whether 
 we believe in a Trinitarian God or a 
 Unitarian. For the individual it may 
 matter less, but for society it means much 
 whether self-subordination is intrinsically 
 divine and truly God-like. 
 
 2. In some things the man is subordi- 
 nate. In the earliest nurture of the child 
 he is quite subordinate, and the mother 
 has a great start of the father in moulding 
 those first years to which our last come 
 
72 THE MATTER 
 
 circling round in such an affecting and 
 influential way. 
 
 3. Objection is taken to the precept 
 of wifely submission in Eph. v. 22. 
 " Wives submit yourselves to your own 
 husbands as unto the Lord." 
 
 Now, one might first ask whether the 
 happiest and most influential homes are 
 not, on the whole, those where this principle 
 reasonably prevails. But leaving that, I 
 offer these remarks : 
 
 (1) What a woman's heart and her 
 interest crave is love much more than 
 lead ; and the same passage teaches the 
 man to love his wife at least as much as 
 himself, i,e. with his whole self. 
 
 (2) The verse before urges the members 
 of the Church to submit themselves to 
 each other in the fear of God. So that 
 the precept to the wife is no more than 
 a particular application of the general 
 precept given to every Christian, male or 
 
OF SUBORDINATION 78 
 
 female ; which therefore enjoins also due 
 submission in its own kind of the Chris- 
 tian husband to the Christian wife. It 
 means mutual and complementary for- 
 bearance, concession, courtesy, sacrifice. 
 (3) The submission is as to the Lord. 
 That is to say, it is under those moral 
 conditions which inhere in the Christian 
 principle, and which forbid the love of rule 
 and pre-eminence for its own wilful sake. 
 It is not clear that absolute obedience 
 is enjoined to a domineering tyrant. The 
 husband contemplated is head only in a 
 sense analogous to that in which Christ is 
 head, i,e, in the spirit, not of right or 
 power, but of love and sacrifice. And 
 the husband contemplated is to love his 
 wife as Christ loved the Church, by 
 giving himself for it. If the wife give 
 herself to the husband, an equal obliga- 
 tion to give himself is created for the 
 husband, if their love endure in the 
 higher love of Christ common to both. 
 
74 THE MATTER 
 
 4. And this leads to the recognition 
 of limits to the submission. It could not 
 go to the length of renouncing Christ at 
 the husband's call if he were a Pagan and 
 a bigot (1 Cor. vii. 15). And if the Pagan 
 husband desert his wife, she is not bound 
 to him any more. She is free. It is not 
 unqualified obedience. It is not absolute. 
 Therefore it is not slavery. It is sub- 
 mission under the conditions of the Church 
 and the Kingdom, and especially under 
 the conditions of love which has service 
 for its principle. 
 
 5. The wifely obedience which was 
 normal in Judaism and Paganism is taken 
 up and kept, but it is also put on such 
 a new base as applies it equally to both 
 parties, and transforms it from an outward 
 law to a willing sympathy. Service and 
 sacrifice become now, in Christ crucified, 
 the divine and common principle of love, 
 in which the wife is invited to lead. What 
 
OF SUBORDINATION 75 
 
 is the objection to the woman leading in 
 sacrifice, as the divine principle of moral 
 dignity, in the cross, as the natural ex- 
 pression of love in practice, and as the 
 divinest principle of life ? Why should 
 the Christian woman not aim at being ad- 
 vanced in a common yielding in Christ ? 
 
 6. This spirit of service and sacrifice 
 is a most needful thing to turn the stoic 
 into the Christian, the moral egoist into 
 the humane brother. 
 
 To-day we are much preoccupied with 
 the cult of Personality, the religion which 
 cuts ethic off from religion, and reduces 
 the Church to an ethical society. Many 
 people are obsessed, in forms coarse or 
 fine, by their own personality and what 
 is due to it. Accordingly they are the 
 victims of recalcitrance, or of self-respect, 
 or of self-realisation. Their supreme duty 
 is that which they consider they owe to 
 the integrity and independence of their 
 
76 THE MATTER 
 
 own individuality, and especially to their 
 moral personality. Their principle is 
 moral self-culture, and everything is sub- 
 ordinated to that. Even their sacrifice has 
 its eye on that. It is moral egoism. It is 
 done to promote their moral development; 
 for the good of what they consider their soul. 
 
 It is an aim that needs conversion. 
 It would make society not a fraternity 
 in any sense, but a conglomerate of moral 
 atoms bursting with self-respect, who 
 have taken up their moral culture as a 
 profession in life. 
 
 This frame of mind may or may not 
 need to be well shaken, but it does need 
 to be Christianised in order to be .really 
 moralised. It is an insufferable excel- 
 lence till it is converted, till its eye is 
 taken off its moral self and all the 
 priggery of it, and people are taught to 
 leave their prickly independence, to save 
 their soul by losing it, and find them- 
 selves by forgetting themselves. 
 
OF SUBORDINATION n 
 
 7. It may be asked whether the spirit 
 of true obedience and subordination, of 
 being forward to serve, does violence to 
 woman's nature, and prevents her finding 
 her true self. In so far as that nature is 
 different from man's, does it suffer, is it 
 perverted, by having service for its first 
 principle ? Is it prevented from coming 
 to itself ? Are the most willing, courteous, 
 serviceable, devoted women, spoiled 
 women ? Do we shrink from women of that 
 temper, as if they were traitors to their sex 
 and nature ? There are women we shrink 
 from, but are they these ? The higher 
 woman is, the higher is her freedom 
 If it is claimed that she is finer than man, 
 so much the finer is her freedom. But the 
 high and fine kind of freedom comes in ser- 
 vice and by it. And, if woman is normally 
 at her highest and finest in marriage, if 
 it is the married and not the single that is 
 the type of the sex, and gives its law and 
 freedom, her freedom as a sex must stand 
 
 :i 
 
78 THE MATTER 
 
 on such pre-eminent sacrifice as is there. 
 That is the line on which a woman finds 
 her true self. And that is the line of her 
 true leadership. The last shall be first. 
 
 8. It may be said that this obedient 
 spirit in women marked but an early and 
 cruder stage, even in Christianity, and that 
 it was destined to be shed, and to fall away 
 like slavery, as Christianity came to itself. 
 The answer is that the case of slavery 
 is not analogous. The principle of any 
 human creature beingthe absolute property 
 of another is quite fatal to Christianity, 
 and must be outgrown. But nowhere 
 in the New Testament is woman regarded 
 as property, and certainly not in marriage. 
 Wherever she is so regarded, Christianity 
 must bring a radical change. In so far 
 as woman's position anywhere is slavery 
 Christianity must alter it. 
 
 But service, obedience, is not slavery, 
 except where people at any age have not 
 
OF SUBORDINATION 70 
 
 outgrown their teens. And to lead in 
 sacrifice is the true eminence in Christ, 
 i.e, in the last moral resort. Sacrifice 
 is the man's Christianity as well as the 
 woman's, if there be neither male nor 
 female in Christ but both. The Christian 
 form of subordination is sacrifice, which is 
 the genius of love, a woman's glory more 
 than her hair, and the very kingly heart 
 of Christ. The promise to obey is but!/ 
 the promise of the sacrifice which love/l 
 cannot help, if it seek not its own, is-' I 
 kind, does not behave itself unseemlyj I 
 and never fails. ^ 
 
 Womanhood always suffers where duties 
 are postponed to rights, service to aggres- 
 sion, and sacrifice to assertion. And to 
 sneer at such a valuation of moral powers 
 is to despise Christ and renounce the cross. 
 
LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
A newspaper has recently appeared among us, which is 
 largely advertised in the streets, and has, I am told, a grow- 
 ing circulation. It is written by women of high education, 
 who, generally speaking, sign their names to what they write. 
 The paper shows, in some respects, conspicuous ability, and 
 is, I believe, eagerly read. The doctrine of the economic 
 independence of women, which is everywhere part and 
 parcel of the suffrage movement, leads, in the case of this 
 ably written paper, to strange results. Motherhood outside 
 marriage, by means of temporary unions for the purpose ; 
 its formal recognition by society, and the conditions on 
 which the " new maids " of the futiure will claim and enforce 
 it; arguments against the "immoral" permanence of mar- 
 riage ; complete freedom of union, under the guidance of 
 passion, between men and women ; and other speculations 
 and contentions with regard to the relations of the sexes — 
 especially in the letters from correspondents — such as could 
 not be reproduced in your columns ; these matters and the 
 handling of them shed a flood of light on certain aspects of 
 the " woman's movement." This newspaper does not stand 
 alone, nor are these aspects a mere negligible quantity. — 
 From a letter by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the *' Times " of 
 June 19, 1912. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 rpHERE are two chief phases of the 
 marriage question as a public or 
 parliamentary question. One I have 
 touched — divorce. The other raises issues 
 much more dangerous. It is the question 
 of the legalisation of terminable or pro- 
 bationary unions : what have been called 
 leasehold marriages. These are really no 
 more than partnerships at will. It is 
 pleaded that, as marriage is primarily 
 a matter of consent, the consent is ter- 
 minable. The same consent that makes, 
 breaks. If people can agree to come 
 together, they can agree to part. And 
 it is urged they should often part for 
 the good of the soul in either case, or, 
 
 83 
 
84 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 as it would be put, in the interest of the 
 free moral personality. The arrangement 
 may end at the instance of either side — 
 with due provision, as the law might 
 determine, for the offspring. 
 
 As if anything could be a due pro- 
 vision for children but the joint and 
 loving care of the parents! How should 
 you expect a child to feel, how do you 
 think its moral growth would be affected 
 by its feeling, towards a parent that had 
 passed through several hands, either be- 
 fore or after its birth ? And what is the 
 exact idea ? Is it monogamy while it 
 lasts ? Or may either party have another 
 brief menage going on at the same time ? 
 
 This is an idea which has a far larger 
 hold of cultivated but non- Christian so- 
 ciety than we are often allowed to realise. 
 Abroad, the propaganda has gone much 
 farther than with us, and especially its 
 advocacy by women in the interest of 
 unwedded motherhood, deliberate and 
 
LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 85 
 
 legalised — the right to a child. But you 
 cannot see much of such society, in this 
 country also, without perceiving how 
 attractive the notion is to many of both 
 sexes to-day. I observed, lately, that 
 the most aggressive German book in this 
 interest was advertised in an English 
 translation. 
 
 If more facility for divorce is pressed 
 in the interest of the poorer classes, this 
 is often urged in the interest of the 
 better-to-do, whose fortune, leisure, and 
 half-culture make their tastes more va- 
 grant, and their independence of society 
 more easy and assertive. The plea begins 
 by recognising the difficulties and even 
 tragedies which we all admit in connec- 
 tion with marriages unhappy and yet in- 
 dissoluble. It may start also with what 
 seems a worthy concern for the dignity 
 of love, and it urges that it is degradation 
 when a union continues from under which 
 the love has ebbed and fled. But its 
 
86 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 way out of the difficulties is downwards, 
 and not upwards. Its interest is indivi- 
 dual (not to say selfish) ; it is not social. 
 And its concern for love gravitates, for 
 want of moral lift in it, to become facility 
 for passion. It has more erotic than ethic. 
 It is the ruin in the end of the moral 
 element in love, because it is not only the 
 ruin of the family, but it destroys the moral 
 development of the parent's personality. 
 For fidelity can be educated by fixity. It 
 is not fidelity if it only last with liking. 
 
 The suggestion, of course, is absolutely 
 unchristian, and mostly anti-Christian. 
 It goes back — I do not here say from 
 Christian principle, which many would 
 reject — but from Christian civilisation, 
 which is the greatest thing civilisation has 
 yet achieved. And it can be met with 
 no sympathy either from Christianity or 
 society, except in so far as it is sometimes 
 an honest but unprincipled effort to 
 cope with evils which exercise us all. 
 
LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 87 
 
 I will only mention a few points of 
 criticism. 
 
 1. It is said that it would tend to 
 diminish vice. If it did, it would be at 
 the cost of all the dignity that belongs 
 to marriage by the moral element that 
 gives the institution permanence. Be- 
 sides, it is very doubtful if it would have 
 such an effect in the long run. It is prac- 
 tically polygamy, only consecutive and 
 not simultaneous. And it is a polygamy 
 that ends at will. What kind of men and 
 women would be manufactured at last 
 by such an institution ? The weaker sex 
 would more and more return to its Oriental 
 position as property ; the stronger would 
 become a pasha. It means the degrada- 
 tion of sexual relations ; and that is both 
 the soul and root of prostitution. It 
 stamps woman as inferior, like all poly- 
 gamy ; and it brands her, like all mere 
 passion, as a mere means, while the man 
 is an end to himself. There is no moral 
 
88 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 development for woman there. It is 
 slavery. And if it is said that the 
 woman is as free to end the relation as 
 the man, practically that is not so. For 
 woman is more constant than man ; 
 she clings, as man does not, to the chil- 
 dren ; and she is also handicapped for 
 all livelihood outside the family. And so 
 she would mostly be the victim. Always 
 outside fixed marriage, the woman stands 
 to be victimised most. 
 
 2. As the woman is naturally more 
 constant than the man, it is the woman 
 that would be the chief sufferer by such 
 an arrangement. And in the relation of 
 the sexes she has too much to suffer as 
 it is. The proposal reverts to the pre- 
 Christian idea of woman. Polygamy and 
 slavery go together, whether the polygamy 
 be consecutive or simultaneous. Mono- 
 gamy for life is a great evolution in the 
 interest of the weaker sex, out of poly- 
 
LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 89 
 
 gamous conditions, whose mischief is the 
 divided interest of the man in the woman. 
 
 Besides, prostitution is largely due to 
 the great change in social conditions 
 which prevents marriage. Let these be 
 altered, even at much cost to the existing 
 order, but do not let the marriage idea 
 be debased. Facilitate the better dis- 
 tribution of the fruits of industry, pro- 
 mote economic independence, and make 
 marriage more possible. Reduce the stan- 
 dard of luxury in women, and cultivate a 
 simpler life. This change is certainly very 
 great, but it is far less than the change we 
 discuss. Our evils cannot be cured by 
 tampering with the sanctity of marriage. 
 As has been said, " You do not cure 
 theft by abolishing property." 
 
 I have described leasehold marriage as 
 polygamy, only polygamy successive and 
 not simultaneous. And I should like 
 to add here that, as between the two 
 forms of polygamy, it is the successive 
 
90 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 that is more deadly to society, because 
 it is more destructive to family life. 
 Islam is more stable than a society of 
 legalised liaisons would be ; yet Islam 
 is less for Humanity than Israel, because 
 of the very different position of the wife. 
 Nothing but permanent monogamy is 
 compatible with family life and all it 
 means for society. 
 
 The demand for a relaxation of the 
 marriage bond, and especially for termin- 
 able marriages is largely promoted by the 
 selfish and vagrant influence of the man 
 at the cost of woman. And it is the 
 woman's interest that is protected by the 
 dignity and fixity of marriage, in so far as 
 the two interests are put in competition. 
 
 We may perhaps look at it in this way : 
 The growth of Humanity is twofold — 
 in quantity and in quality. On the one 
 hand the race grows in numbers and 
 is prolonged in time ; on the other hand 
 
LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 91 
 
 it grows in power, resource, civilisation, 
 culture. On the one hand it spreads 
 over the face of the earth, in space, and 
 extends through history, in time ; on 
 the other it dilates, so to say, it becomes 
 ampler, fuller, richer in mental mastery 
 and spiritual content. It is fruitful, mul- 
 tiplies, and replenishes the earth ; and 
 it acquires more and more dominion over 
 the creatures. It grows in size, and it 
 grows in civilisation. 
 
 Now, each of these forms of growth 
 means burden, labour, and sorrow. 
 But the burden of the one falls chiefly 
 on the woman, and the burden of 
 the other on the man. On the woman 
 chiefly falls the burden of population, 
 on the man chiefly that of civilisa- 
 tion. I am speaking of the chief stress, 
 observe. And, in the matter of con- 
 tinuing the race, the chief burden falls 
 on the woman. It is upon the one 
 organism rather than the other that 
 
92 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 nature lays the labour and sorrow in 
 this respect. And it is the woman there- 
 fore that requires special consideration 
 in the institutions that have most to do 
 with the continuity of the race. The 
 institution which has charge of this in 
 particular is marriage. And the only 
 form of marriage which really harmonises 
 the two functions, and specially protects 
 and compensates the woman in her func- 
 tion, is fixed and monogamous. 
 
 Monogamy organised, guarded, and 
 sanctified by Church and State is in the 
 woman's interest especially. She has 
 most to lose in the slackening of it. To 
 tamper with it is to unroof the fabric in 
 which maternity has its shelter. It is a 
 suicidal thing that the male interest, which 
 makes for the race's power, should pro- 
 mote an ethic which destroys the female 
 interest of the race's continuation ; that 
 the male interest of power should acquire 
 the vice of power — selfishness — at the cost 
 
LEASJ:H0LD MARRlAGli 98 
 
 of the female interest of existence, and 
 the sacrifice it entails. If the powerful 
 man discourage monogamy in the in- 
 terest of his selfishness he is pulling 
 down the house in which alone even 
 power can continue to live and grow. 
 
 It is often said that women live in the 
 moment, and that it is men who have the 
 sense of implicates and consequences ; 
 that women are engrossed with particulars 
 and personalities, and men look before 
 and after to universals and to general 
 justice. But here, at least, the case is 
 otherwise. The man lives in the moment, 
 it is the woman that lives in the world of 
 consequences. And it is the woman, 
 therefore, that has the prime interest in 
 that social morality which compels the 
 instinct of the moment to come under 
 the obligations created by consequences. 
 Monogamy is the charter of maternity, the ' 
 bridle on vagrant selfishness, the shelter 
 of the weak, the stay of the fickle, and 
 
94 LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 
 
 the one institution for converting erotic 
 chaos into a moral order of society. 
 
 And the lamentable, dreadful fact that 
 so many women are forward to promote 
 terminable marriage, or even single ma- 
 ternity, is really a tribute to the social 
 security that permanent monogamy has 
 given. Monogamous marriage has sunk 
 so deep into society, and made the 
 position of women so secure, that such 
 advocates can form no idea of what 
 society would be, especially for their sex, 
 if their programme got its head. They 
 do not know life. The sex, which has 
 such experience of consequences, has little 
 imagination for consequences ; and these 
 women cannot envisage the situation their 
 theories would produce. They sap mar- 
 riage under the shelter of its roof. And 
 they can only be forgiven (as one says) 
 because they know not what they do. 
 
 3. It is said that it is motherhood that 
 
LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE 95 
 
 IS holy, not wifehood. But I shall shortly 
 show that under this system motherhood 
 must either cease or suffer. I only say 
 here two things. First, that the revolt 
 of the sex means revolt against wifehood 
 rather than motherhood, because the man 
 and woman make a claim on each other's 
 egoism which is not made by the child. 
 The child can even flatter it, as needing a 
 protector ; but the spouse certainly limits 
 it. And, if the worst evil be thought to be 
 such limitation of egoism, wifehood is sure 
 to be resented. Second, all motherhood is 
 not holy. To say that it is, is a piece of 
 sentimental naturalism belonging to the 
 inferior fiction, and leading us to a social 
 morass. Some motherhood should be the 
 object of deep compassion and kindness, 
 but not of respect — as the fatherhood in 
 it deserves a social scourge. No society 
 can be founded or maintained upon the 
 pity which is so precious in our private 
 and personal relations. 
 
THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 4. THE woman's protest 
 
 T>UT it is not only the best in- 
 terests of the woman that pro- 
 test against these terminable marriages, 
 but her finest instincts. Whatever may 
 be the case with individuals, all that is 
 most womanly in the sex turns against 
 such ethic. The delicacy and dignity of 
 woman resent it. The finer her soul is, 
 so much the more does she measure the 
 higher aspects of the great and unreserved 
 committal she makes in marriage ; and 
 she feels it so much that she has courage 
 to make it only on the foundation of a 
 tender and sacred faith that it is for life. 
 A life for a life. What she gives is her 
 whole life, her whcJe pe^rsc>nality_in its 
 
100 THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 
 
 most central and sacred sanctuary ; and 
 that should only be given for life. The 
 fixity of marriage for life is only the social 
 counterpart of the great spiritual unity 
 of the moral personality in its sacred 
 surrender. It is often said that marriage 
 may be an episode for a man but for a 
 woman it is her all. Therefore her nature 
 demands that it be once for all. 
 ' A woman deceived in this matter has 
 a wound that never closes. The tragedy 
 does not go out of her life, whether she 
 cover it or not. If she do not cover it, if she 
 rebel, if she separate and take her way by 
 herself, she may be smitten so inwardly 
 and sacredly that rebellion often seems 
 a coarse term, and public championship 
 of injured wifehood a vulgar thing. 
 
 In a certain novel one such woman 
 learns utterly to despise her husband, 
 and she takes steps to free herself. A 
 circle of her friends wish to celebrate her 
 for her bold action, but she turns away, 
 
THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 101 
 
 stung and disgusted. " A horrible grief," 
 says the writer, " came over her. These 
 people had no idea of the abyss of her 
 sorrow. The last surrender of soul and 
 bodv did not mean for them the sacra- 
 mental thing it did for her. Something 
 in them must have long gone blunt and 
 dull. Did they ever know what it meant 
 to drop the last veil of the personality, 
 ' laying flesh and spirit in his hands ' ? 
 Everything in her rose up against them. 
 ' It was my holy fire,' she said, ' my 
 white flame. And to let myself be feted 
 about it all, to be treated as if I were but 
 a principle — it is silty, it is mad, it is 
 insulting. Have they no eyes to see how 
 I suffer ? '" . 
 
 All that rises to such a height in 
 womanhood, all that so finely and sacredly 
 feels, rises also to protest against any 
 ethic of marriage which makes it but 
 a passionate contract instead of a sacra- 
 mental union with a permanent mate. 
 
102 THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 
 
 If the true inwardness of it is so delicate 
 and abiding for the one party, it is not 
 less so for the other. You cannot have a 
 double ethic here. This feeling of the 
 woman strikes the note of the whole 
 relation. Life-committal for both is of its 
 essence and idea. Though, of course, at the 
 present social stage, for the hardness of 
 our heart, practical exigencies, due to 
 human weakness or wickedness, may pre- 
 scribe divorce carefully allowed under the 
 sacred authority of State or Church. 
 
 But let us note clearly that it is divorce 
 from a bond which was contemplated as 
 permanent, which is in its idea permanent, 
 which is permanent as an institution; 
 whereas the legal recognition of unions ter- 
 minable by consent would alter the inner 
 nature and idea of the institution itself. 
 It publishes to the world the conviction 
 of society that the principle of marriage 
 is fleeting in its nature, that it is a love 
 which need not be expected to be lasting 
 
THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 103 
 
 or faithful. And that is a principle that 
 could not be socially advertised without 
 stirring up all that makes man most 
 worthy and woman most womanly to 
 protest and condemn. If the institution 
 led us to think so of love, if it was based 
 on such an idea of it, the whole conception 
 of love would slowly sink, " half dead to 
 know that it could die." 
 
 5. The fact is, that here the instinct of 
 the true woman, educated by millenniums 
 of experience of motherhood, points to 
 the sound condition of racial welfare. 
 The racial instinct is in her, not only 
 purer, but truer. And the finest and 
 subtlest feeling holds the real clue and 
 the real power in the case. If we speak 
 of natural selection, the secret of the 
 truly natural selection in the continua- 
 tion of the race is more vitally seized by 
 the woman. Her instinct says that the 
 race's renovation from generation to 
 
104 THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 
 
 generation must be taken more seriously 
 from generation to generation, and its 
 principle made more stable. 
 
 It may be true that women are more 
 interested in individuals than in groups, 
 or even principles ; but it is also true 
 . that they demand the whole individual 
 j for life. And jealousy is but the seamy 
 I side of that sound instinct. A woman's 
 affections may be individual, but her 
 relation to that individual is properly 
 monopolist, however free. Individual as 
 the passion may be, she is social enough 
 to read in the bond more than passion, a 
 moral permanency beyond passion ; and 
 she shapes the institution for more. Her 
 interest, her preoccupation, may be in 
 the present ; but her instinct, her pre- 
 sentiment, her divination, is for the future. 
 All this means that as an institution 
 marriage looks beyond the individual 
 or his moods, and has its great reference 
 to the race and its future. 
 
THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 105 
 
 But terminable marriage is based on 
 the opposite principle. It regards the 
 individual and not the race ; and it 
 regards the individual only on his im- 
 pulsive side. It bends the institution 
 from the service of the race to that of 
 the individual, or even to that of his 
 fleeting predilections. It is not ethical 
 but erotic. Individual happiness, or even 
 the egoism of two, is not the supreme 
 principle of marriage. That is a principle 
 which regards first the welfare of society 
 and its happiness. Now the first social 
 interest of society is the family, i.e. not 
 the parents alone and their enjoyment, 
 but the child also and sacrifice for it ; 
 not the present, but the future. Posterity 
 does as much for the ideal society as 
 ancestry. And the worst indictment 
 against terminable marriage is that it 
 breaks up this family idea. It ends in racial 
 suicide, or, if not, it demolishes fatherhood, 
 and to that extent damages childhood, \ 
 
106 THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 
 
 Nature is more mighty than man's 
 device, and nature will secure, on the 
 whole, that the mother clings to the child 
 when she has agreed to part from its 
 father, or when he discards both from 
 his concern. Fatherhood thus goes out 
 of the child's life, even if motherhood 
 remains. It also goes out of the religion 
 of a race so reared, which would be left 
 with but a motherly God. We estimate 
 highly, indeed, the effect of the mother 
 on men — on great men, and all men. 
 But has the experience of that influence 
 been gained under the conditions now pro- 
 posed — of easy desertion by the father ? 
 
 Often, it is true, the widow as mother 
 has to do what she can to supply the 
 lack of the father, and to magnify his 
 name in the memory of the children. 
 But how is she to do that for a father 
 whom she has exchanged for another, or 
 one who has parted with her because one 
 or both were tired of it, It is hard to 
 
THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 107 
 
 estimate the influence of a father in the 
 house, even if the mother do all the 
 explicit training. And while the mother 
 is stamped on the earliest years, the father 
 is stamped on adolescence, and gives the 
 child its personality among the world of 
 men. 
 
 Besides, what removes the father in 
 this way impairs also the care of the 
 mother. The whole system sacrifices thej 
 child to the parents, and shows that they 
 are not really parents but selfish erotics.- 
 (Throughout I am not using the word' 
 in the grossest sense.) For unless all 
 children are taken to be brought up by 
 the State in public nurseries, terminable 
 union means that the mother is left with 
 the children ; and her natural doom of 
 bearing them alone is prolonged into the 
 unnatural burden of rearing them alone. 
 
 The rich, of course, could make pro- 
 vision as to funds for this purpose; but 
 the change proposed rouses problems no 
 
108 THE WOMAN'S PROTEST 
 
 funds can solve. And, besides, it would 
 not affect the rich only, and its effect 
 must be calculated upon its working in 
 the mass. And that would mean that 
 the mother would be taken away from the 
 very thing left her to do. She would 
 have to do what is done with evil con- 
 sequences in the mills — she would have 
 to go to work merely to maintain the 
 children she should educate. She would 
 be cast more than ever into the economic 
 struggle, not with other women only, but 
 with men more or less free from her 
 responsibilities. And either she would 
 break down, or her training of the family 
 would. 
 
 It is so fatal to society to tamper with 
 the fixity of marriage, because it is most 
 fatal to the weak elements whose defence 
 a moral society ought to be — to the 
 woman's womanly quality and the child's 
 moral growth. 
 
A CONSERVATIVE SANCTUARY 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 6. A CONSERVATIVE SANCTUARY 
 
 SOCIETY, therefore, ought to be 
 immovable in this matter. The 
 farther in we go upon the sacred, subtle, 
 and even sub -conscious parts of our nature, 
 so much the nearer we come to the central 
 shrine where the waves of change scarcely 
 reach. We come to the diamond axis upon 
 which all change revolves. We reach 
 the conservative sanctuary which makes 
 all progress safe, because it harbours and 
 gathers in repose the creative power that 
 makes progress at all possible. It is a 
 region beyond the reach of our new 
 schemes and systems, and the most sacred 
 parts of our nature abut upon it. Upon 
 
 it give those windows of our being which 
 
 111 
 
112 A CONSERVATIVE SANCTUARY 
 
 open as magic casements upon mystic 
 seas. 
 
 In this region reside the slow influences 
 that mould us in marriage and family. 
 These are powers that easily escape our 
 chronic levity, and what Carlyle called 
 our snigger at the universe. We cannot 
 readily weigh them, for they are not 
 entirely in the domain of our conscience ; 
 they are often beneath it. Of all social 
 institutions in the natural realm the 
 family is that which has the most deep 
 and unconscious effect on us. How else 
 is it that death and loss reveal to us in 
 heart agony the depth of a relation which 
 was growing up, we know not how, amid 
 all the routines and trifles of day after 
 day, and closing in upon our heart, as it 
 were, with strong but transparent walls, 
 which were for us as if they were not, 
 till we found ourselves cut to the bone 
 among their splinters. Amid all the 
 happy give-and-take of common life, and 
 
A CONSERVATIVE SANCTUARY 113 
 
 common joys, and common cares, we were 
 being subtly bound with a network of ties 
 which, when they are torn out, take our 
 hearts in bleeding pieces with them. 
 
 It has taken society a very long time 
 to grow to this discipline. Ages and ages 
 of social evolution are registered in our 
 submission to such fine bonds, and our 
 lacing by such silken threads. And the 
 fabric is as firm as the slow deposit of 
 coral islands upon the ocean's bed, which 
 both rise to the top and spread to each 
 other, till an archipelago becomes a con- 
 tinent. You cannot trace here the swift 
 progress you freely mark elsewhere. We 
 are here among the great, solemn, and 
 abiding things. So that, if ever this 
 institution had to be changed, it would 
 require a combination of all the best and 
 greatest forces of the whole race, all its 
 most spiritual forces, working from its 
 deepest heart. 
 
 The social programme-makers are here 
 8 
 
114 A CONSERVATIVE SANCTtJARV 
 
 no more than pigmies pottering at the 
 base of Olympus. To dissolve the great 
 divine Triad of Father, Mother, Child, 
 would require a force equal at least to 
 that which has made society itself. It 
 is far beyond the theories of social system- 
 mongers, or the heresies of intellectuals. 
 Monogamy is not an artificial institution 
 forced down on mankind, but a spiritual 
 institution rising out of it. 
 
 And, in any case, whatever changes 
 come must be so slow as to be almost 
 imperceptible at any one point of time. 
 The quest is all too new and young yet 
 to affect such hoary and venerable prac- 
 tice. ; Marriage is a far more permanent 
 institution than any other, j Nothing can 
 affect it which is attempted from either 
 the man's side alone or the woman's. 
 It could be changed only from the inter- 
 action of both for their action on the 
 child, and on the future of which the 
 child is trustee. 
 
A CONSERVATIVE SANCTUARY 115 
 
 Women, at least, should realise that 
 they can do nothing in this direction by 
 writing on erotic lines, but only by making 
 the sex a greater and greater factor in 
 the ethic of the race. And this they can 
 never do by devoting themselves to love 
 as a free passion, as an explosive under 
 the pillars of society, but to love as a 
 moral power carrying society ; not to 
 the love that looses, but the love that 
 binds ; not to the love that releases for 
 enjoyment, but to the love that commits 
 to sacrifice. And all that women win 
 upon other fields of life will culminate 
 and be registered in their effect upon the 
 ethics of love. All the progress they 
 may make has its value only as it tells 
 for their growth in power upon the race 
 at its centre of delicate dignity and 
 moral taste. 
 
 The growing power of the life of love 
 lies in the line of its moral refinement ; 
 and, if the age of chivalry and idolatry 
 
116 A CONSERVATIVE SANCTUARY 
 
 towards women is gone, it is because we 
 are rising to the age of a truer sanctity 
 in women. The chivahy men feel to 
 them can only continue if it rise, if it is 
 uplifted by the sanctity women feel in | 
 themselves and their surrender. Thev 
 must be in a position and in a mood to 
 dwell less upon love's fantasy and more 
 on its sanctity. They must be educated 
 less by romances that tickle them and 
 more by spiritual powers that rule them. 
 And they must strengthen men in that 
 direction. For, as one writer says, 
 " people make too much of mere love, 
 both in modern life and modern art ; 
 and that is at the bottom of so much of 
 the sickliness and weakness of our time." 
 
LOVE'S DIGNITY AND SINCERITY 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 7. love's dignity and sincerity 
 
 T EASEHOLD marriage is said to 
 be in the interest of the reality 
 of sexual relations. Under the proposed 
 conditions people could separate without 
 fuss when they grew incompatible and 
 the relation became hollow. It is asked, 
 ' Do we increase the sanctity of marriage 
 by putting it above its truth and reality ? 
 We only create Pharisaism.' 
 
 The answer is (1) that, if marriage could 
 be dissolved by consent, there would 
 then be no motive to discipline those 
 faults that easily become magnified into 
 incompatibility. The idea of mutual 
 discipline would not enter into marriage 
 at all — as to so many it never does, 
 
 119 
 
120 LOVE'S DIGNITY 
 
 They plead they must be themselves, and 
 not immolate their individuality. There 
 would be no thought of marriage acting 
 as a school of moral reality. 
 
 (2) The truth and reality of mar- 
 riage would too easily be identified with 
 the life of mere passion or romance ; and 
 the decay of that flush would soon become 
 a charter for vagrancy and its hollo wness. 
 
 (3) The fixity of marriage is the moral 
 condition for converting the decay of pas- 
 sion into the growth of real affection, 
 especially under Christian culture and 
 power. 
 
 (4) Is there no Pharisaism, no unreality, 
 when human beings, who were made 
 with a moral nature for supremely moral 
 issues, disguise the fact even to them- 
 selves and masquerade in a light vesture 
 of passion or preference alone ? The man 
 supremely ruled by passion is a fraud to 
 human nature. Man, it has been said, is 
 more than an erotic process, and this 
 
AND SINCERITY 121 
 
 more means obligation, responsibility, the 
 freedom of his soul, against the vagrancy 
 of the moment's appetite and the slavery 
 of chance desires. And if he ignore this, 
 he is not only living in unreality, he is not 
 only severed from the great moral whole 
 which gives him his reality, but he is 
 crumbling and hollow within, and the 
 whole economy of his soul is going to 
 pieces. He may pass through moral prig- 
 gery to Pharisaism of his own subtle kind. 
 It is not love that is free with him, it is 
 not the great love, but the small passion, 
 which dries up in its own heat. What 
 is free is the infidelity of his egoism, 
 and the love of impatient change. And 
 for a man to live in that freedom is to 
 live in a falsity and a Pharisaism to his 
 true nature and best self. 
 
 (5) It is impossible that two legitimate 
 forms of marriage could exist alongside 
 without one of them being rated as 
 inferior, and so treated in society. What 
 
122 LOVE'S DIGNITY 
 
 would happen if that one were permanent 
 marriage ? And if it were the other, 
 the object of the propaganda I discuss 
 would be lost. It wants the concubine 
 to be as well received as the wife. 
 
 (6) The plea of the old ethic, it will 
 have been seen, is sometimes adopted by 
 the new. It is owned that the object of 
 marriage is the development of the moral 
 personality. But it is pleaded that, in 
 a vast number of cases, life-marriage not 
 only destroys the moral personality, but 
 prevents a union that would develop it. 
 
 The answer is manifold, and has in 
 part been given already. 
 
 (a) Reflect on the educative influence, 
 through ages, of the idea of an institution. 
 The idea of life-marriage not only moulds 
 a character of self-restraint and service, 
 but also slowly lifts through ages the 
 idea and tone of social life. 
 
 (b) There are moral influences avail- 
 able, especially in Christianity, which can 
 
AND SINCERITY 123 
 
 sanctify the disappointment of many 
 unsatisfactory marriages for both parties, 
 and even tap a new spring of affection. 
 The love ceasing to be instinctive passion 
 changes into a new application of Chris- 
 tian love and moral kindness. 
 
 (c) The cure would be worse than the 
 disease — especially so long as legal separa- 
 tion is possible as a remedy. It is not 
 mere love that is the source of the moral 
 education, but love with the moral ele- 
 ment of fidelity — holy love. But the 
 new ethic rests on the idea of freedom, 
 on the mere resentment of restraint — 
 ' I must be my true, complete, and 
 harmonious self.' That is what is known 
 as the cult of personality turned cant. 
 It is the morbid passion for a superior 
 egoism. It is the Pharisaism of the new 
 cult. As if " ^twere growing like a tree, 
 all round, that made man better be." 
 It cultivates a forest of self-contained 
 pines, not a society of generous men with 
 
124 LOVE'S DIGNITY 
 
 a boundless contiguity of shade. It is 
 the aristocratic ethic of individual culture 
 at any price ; it is not the nobly demo- 
 cratic ethic which rears the individuals 
 as members one of another. Freedom is 
 certainly one condition of moral discipline, 
 but the source of discipline is not freedom, 
 but control, obedience, experience. True 
 freedom is the effect of discipline, not 
 its cause. 
 
 The advocates of this svstem seem, in 
 some respects, to lack knowledge of the 
 world, or the insight that interprets it. 
 That many women are said to favour it 
 shows it to be based largely on lack of 
 knowledge of life. It is the fantasy of 
 incorrigible Utopians, sheltered idealists, 
 or inexperienced optimists. 
 
 The best that can be said for this new 
 ethic turns upon the cult of personality. 
 But the cult of personality without the 
 higher cult of authority is the cult of 
 mere self-will. And one cannot conceive 
 
AND SINCERITY 125 
 
 of any moral authority compatible with 
 such free love. It can be prosecuted 
 only by the repudiation of authority. 
 No moral authority could sanction it, 
 and remain an authority. No real 
 authority could be so fatal to society as 
 such liberty would be. 
 
 8. Leasehold marriage is fundamentally , 
 wrong because it starts from the postu- 
 late that love is in its nature a ficklel / 
 thing, and it asks for deliberate and- 
 public recognition of the fact. It seeks | 
 to reorganise society in the interest of 
 the doctrine that love is in its nature 
 fugitive. And yet it claims to act in the 
 name and interest of a love which fixed 
 marriage tends to debase. Could you 
 have a stable society on the foundation 
 of a soluble base ? We do believe that 
 society is on a stable base on the whole, 
 whatever revolutions may take place. 
 But we could not continue to trust that, 
 
126 LOVE'S DIGNITY 
 
 if we came to think that the chief cement 
 of society was such a poor adhesive. 
 We should feel society was but gummed 
 together and not built. Love is half 
 dead when it begins by admitting, and 
 even parading, that it can die. I have 
 already alluded to the educative effect 
 on the public mind of the conception of 
 love which is imbedded in indissoluble 
 monogamy. It is the great register of 
 the moral progress of society. 
 
 9. It has been seen that it is a vice of 
 the leasehold system that ilP* tends to 
 substitute erotic for ethic ; to treat 
 passion devoid of the moral element as 
 the justification of a union, and even as 
 its sanctification. And here I should 
 like to make some very relevant protest 
 against the extent to which the interests 
 of the heart, whether sentimental or 
 passionate, are allowed to monopolise the 
 attention of the young, and form them 
 
AND SINCERITY 127 
 
 at the plastic time. It may be in the 
 way of rehgion, or it may be in the way 
 of literature or the drama, or it may be 
 by social intercourse. The idea of love, 
 which is only too ready to monopolise the 
 years of adolescence, is encouraged, and 
 even forced, to the destruction of intelli- 
 gence on the one hand and of conscience on 
 the other, to say nothing of reverence for 
 love itself. Just as in religion we have 
 a mawkish culture of charity and urbanity 
 which makes men indifferent to either 
 truth or justice, so you have an atmo- 
 sphere of* sentiment or a world of 
 passion which fills the mind to the ex- 
 clusion of the nobler and firmer concerns of 
 character. 
 
 Jowett of Balliol protested against the 
 extent to which the thoughts and imagina- 
 tions of youth were occupied with the 
 love interests, especially through poetry, 
 as if nothing were really interesting to 
 the young but the opposite sex. He was 
 
128 LOVE'S DIGNITY 
 
 not thinking, nor am I, of the vicious 
 side of it. He meant the obsession by 
 sentiment which is innocent enough, to 
 the neglect of other and greater concerns ; 
 the hypertrophy of this side of things 
 in both sexes, and especially in men, 
 which destroys the virile note, puts upon 
 religion itself a subjective and sickly cast, 
 and destroys the force of its protest for 
 moral issues. What is the public value of 
 the moral protests which are raised from 
 soft religion ? Who attends to the public 
 ethic of sweet sentimentalists ? Obsession 
 of this kind should be countered by the 
 promotion of sport, the earnestness of 
 education, the provision of some positive 
 moral education, the rescue of the Univer- 
 sities from being mere social opportuni- 
 ties, the opening of careers to women, 
 their invitation into social activities, and 
 the dropping of the coaxing, and even 
 coddling, note on the part of the churches 
 in dealing with the young. 
 
AND SINCERITY 129 
 
 By many such things might such an 
 obsession be qualified and corrected. For 
 the worst of it is that even when the 
 interest of the one sex in the other is 
 quite natural and innocent, yet, if it is 
 made almost the whole concern, it pro- 
 duces a soil and climate which the supre- 
 macy of passion finds but too congenial 
 as soon as a fiery temptation comes. 
 You pile up tinder for any spark. What 
 is being done, even by religion, for the 
 moral education of youth as compared 
 with its popular appeal to the sympa- 
 thetic and impulsive ? And is the result 
 as valuable as the product is, say, in 
 "Captains Courageous," where, without 
 a woman in the process at all, a little 
 horror, caught in time, is brought up by 
 man's hand and God's sea to be the man- 
 liest of men. 
 
 9 
 
1 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 TT7HAT I say has a special bearing 
 on literature, and on the literature 
 of fiction in particular. I am not for the 
 moment discussing novel-reading as mere 
 fictional hypertrophy. I am not thinking 
 of the over-development of the imagina- 
 tive side of character at the cost of the 
 intelligent or the practical. I am not con- 
 cerned for the moment with the statistics 
 of libraries as to the excess of novels 
 issued over what is called more solid 
 reading. I quite recognise that the in- 
 cessant tickling of the imagination and 
 the sympathies must be bad for both ; 
 and there is the old argument about the 
 waste on imaginary cases of that pity 
 
 133 
 
134 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 which should have inspired action to help 
 actual cases. But I leave that aside. 
 
 Moreover, I recognise and I prize the im- 
 mense number of stories and poems whose 
 educative influence on the affections can 
 only be good — unless they make us forget 
 that there are other things that need educat- 
 ing than the affections, for the very sake of 
 the affections themselves, that knowledge, 
 nolessthanfeelingjis required for theheart's 
 just, full, and reasonable life. It is de- 
 moralising for affection to be made to think 
 so much about itself, just as it is a bad 
 religion that is always thinking and talking 
 about religion ; and it is the preachers' peril. 
 
 What I am thinking of is the pre- 
 occupation of this imaginative literature 
 which forms the staple of young reading 
 with the love interest. My complaint 
 is against the abuse of even pure fiction 
 which never takes the reader out of the 
 region of sexual sentiment. And my 
 fear is that preoccupation with such fiction 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 135 
 
 creates a social atmosphere in which it is 
 too easy to become engrossed with bad 
 fiction — fiction which no censorship could 
 repress but which tends wrong. Tendency 
 here is more serious than teaching. And 
 all writing tends wrong, however correct, 
 which promotes in any way the idea, which 
 I call erotic, that passion is its own law, 
 is the one thing that matters in life, and 
 is the real foundation of the union of sex. 
 
 It is a great calamity that such educa- 
 tion as the heart receives owes so much 
 more to fugitive literature than to the 
 Church or the family at the present hour. 
 Here again we should speak with care. 
 For novels are now a part of education, 
 and there are, of course, no few favourites 
 that are not only perfectly healthy, but 
 unconsciously educative in the soundest 
 way. They betray an author no less 
 wise and kind as a mentor than happy 
 as a story-teller. But these are apt to 
 
136 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 be regarded as not strong enough food 
 for the emancipated and forthright. The 
 worst of the hterary treatment of this sub- 
 ject is that happy marriage is no literary 
 asset. Itdoes not lend itself to acute literary 
 effect. If we were guided only by the 
 poetry, fiction, or drama of the day (and 
 I am thinking of an area much wider than 
 England), we might conclude that there 
 were few other interests for a man or 
 woman than love, especially irregular love, 
 and but few happy marriages as the result. 
 I do not say for a moment that fiction 
 should not handle such subjects. Fiction 
 presents or interprets life, and they play 
 a powerful part in life. But they are 
 exceptional and solemn tragedies. And 
 one objects to their becoming a daily 
 entertainment, as novel after novel is read 
 turning on that motive, or plays are seen 
 — novels and plays, too, in which the 
 solemnity of the matter is stripped away, 
 and the subject, becoming an exploitable 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 137 
 
 idea, acquires a pedestrian, or even vulgar 
 note, to tickle the groundlings' curiosity or 
 fill the idlest hour. Or it may be that the 
 wit is hard, cynical, and irresponsible, while 
 the ethic is offensively anti-Christian. 
 
 Of course there are many unhappy 
 marriages, often due to the poverty of 
 social opportunity^ or the crudit}^ of our 
 social stage of progress, or to that bad 
 education of the heart of which I speak. 
 There are many marriages which do not 
 continue the romantic, rhapsodic, Byronic 
 idea of love which makes such an element 
 in the fiction of women for women. 
 Are they therefore failures ? Married life ! 
 is often ruined by the notion that the ideal \ 
 marriage should be found ready-made, that ' 
 two people should expect to settle down 
 into it as they would into the enjoyment « 
 of a house presented to them ready \ 
 decorated and furnished for a lifetime, \ 
 and that its happiness should come and * 
 remain without effort or discipline. 
 
138 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 The truth that needs teaching, and is 
 not taught, is that the ideal marriage, 
 like the ideal personality, grows ; that 
 the true appropriation of this gift is 
 the heart-culture of a lifetime. It does 
 not drop ripe into our mouth. It is 
 the fruit of difficulty, pain, sacrifice, and 
 it is not quite unacquainted with friction. 
 Reckon on such things, and turn them 
 to moral account. Tiffs are not tragedies. 
 It is childish, as soon as the clouds begin, 
 to drop, to think that heaven is burst. 
 A happy marriage depends on the way 
 these things are handled, and not on their 
 entire absence. And a mistake is not 
 irreparable. 
 
 Of course statistics are not possible 
 on such a subject. But, when all is said, 
 there is a huge average of those happy 
 and affectionate marriages which it is the 
 literary fashion to call humdrum because 
 they do not make copy, because they 
 have not thrills, because the literarv 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 139 
 
 interest lies so largely in the tragic or 
 sensational, or because it still labours with 
 the old stage direction that marriage ends 
 all. Marriage begins all. 
 
 The number of plays or novels that 
 turn upon the breach or the failure of 
 marriage would make us bad pessimists 
 if we based our diagnosis of actual society 
 on what the writers present. If the young 
 are encouraged to think too much about 
 licit affection, the married are encouraged 
 to an interest too great in illicit. But, 
 after all, the theatre is not England, the 
 literary circle is not society, as Paris is 
 not France. And even when w^e note 
 the popularity of stories presenting a life 
 of friction and a dismal close, we are 
 cheered to think that there must be an 
 immense amount of verve, happiness, and 
 optimism among the people who can read 
 such things. They must also be largely 
 read by too comfortable people, who 
 never come into contact with life's care 
 
140 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 or tragedy except in their easy-chair. I 
 do not suppose doctors, lawyers, or 
 ministers read much of the pessimist or 
 spasmodic novel. They have their hearts 
 harrowed with the real thing, which 
 imagination should enable us either to 
 glorify or to forget, and should not 
 merely reproduce and exploit. So, when 
 one notes the appetite for novels and 
 plays which turn on married infidelity 
 and heartbreak, one may perhaps reflect 
 that there must be much wholesome and 
 fearless wedlock in the inquisitive audiences 
 that enjoy such things. They represent 
 something, like dukedoms, which does not 
 enter the life of that public. It is not 
 easy to think of any member of a family 
 being able to bear the representation of 
 such things if they had actually invaded 
 it. You cannot, it is said, speak of a 
 rope among the relatives of the hanged. 
 
 I am sure, therefore, that much of the 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 141 
 
 laxity that invades our idea of marriage 
 is due to what Carlyle so rejoiced in — the 
 literary person as priest or mentor, with 
 the higher naturalism as his capital. And 
 it is a fact bound to have serious conse- 
 quences for ethic and society, that our 
 youth forms such ideas as it has upon 
 these matters from its favourite litera- 
 ture, chiefly from novels whose only religion 
 is but inflated passion, and seldom from 
 serious and studious teachers of social 
 ethic, or from the one teacher of Christian 
 ethic, the Church. 
 
 I am not asking if that is the fault of 
 the Church's teachers in avoiding or 
 neglecting such subjects. To an extent 
 it is. But I am only noting the fact. 
 And it is particularly unfortunate in 
 regard to the moral culture of women. 
 It may be said that that is mostly effected 
 by the romantic way, by the stories 
 they read. Now, apart from those writers 
 who are contemptuous of ethics in the 
 
142 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE! 
 
 treatment of passion, and apart from 
 those who hate Christian ethic in par- 
 ticular, the capital of all but the very 
 greatest imaginative writers is the passions 
 "per se, and especially the passion of love. 
 And their principle is apt to be, " Love 
 is enough," with a tendency to pass on 
 and say, " Love is its own law." 
 
 I have already regretted that the minds 
 of the young are so filled, and even 
 stuffed, with the idea of such love. It stirs 
 the regret, not only of such teachers 
 as I have named, but of earnest writers 
 in other countries. I am not here of course 
 speaking of sensual passion. In some 
 ways that does less mischief than fantastic 
 or platonic passion, passion imaginative 
 and transferable — 
 
 "Ever let the fancy roam. 
 Fancy never is at home." 
 
 Passion is saved by the element which 
 raises love above, not the sensuous only, 
 but also the fantastic, to the faithful 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 143 
 
 and the moral. And platonic affection 
 
 g 
 
 mostly ends in plutonic. r 
 
 The capital of the story-teller is natural 
 love, and an infinite variety of fantasias 
 are played on its elemental notes. And 
 there is an incessant titillation of those 
 interests and that side of the nature. 
 Natural love comes to be the one in- 
 terest life has for many such minds. The 
 supremacy of such love becomes the onl}^ 
 principle that quickens life. Religion, 
 which should rule life, has no creative or 
 regulative place. What novelist handles 
 the soul ? And, unhappily, some forms of 
 religion encourage that note. We even 
 have erotic religion. People are told in 
 all kinds of ways that God is love, and 
 Christianity is the religion of love — 
 people whose one idea of love is natural 
 affection. Holy demand goes out of sight. 
 God is offered as the glorification of natural 
 affection, or its benediction. And the 
 only ethic such a religion knows is an 
 
 < ,- 
 
144 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 ethic of allowance or pity, not of the holy. 
 It all co-operates sub-consciously with 
 the habit of a literary age to make 
 morality imaginative at best and senti- 
 mental at worst. It canonises natural 
 and instinctive Humanity, and makes re- 
 ligion itself egoistic. 
 
 And to such a frame of mind, where 
 worship is unknown, where obedience but 
 galls, where sympathy is the one living 
 thing, where all above us is but a dark and 
 often tragic fate, where all beyond us is a 
 dreary desert, with the old lights quenched 
 by death, and nothing but mist coming 
 down — I say to such a frame of mind 
 the suggestion of temporary marriage 
 comes with a certain plausibility, as recog- 
 nising the sanctity of love alone in the 
 union, and as ending the Pharisaism of 
 union when love fades from its first glow. 
 The idea of leasehold marriage, I have 
 said, rests on such erotic alone and not 
 upon faith or ethic. It rests on the fallacy 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 145 
 
 that passion alone consecrates union, and 
 
 passion in its intensity rather than its 
 
 quality. That is Eroticism. And it will 
 
 even venture to press into its service much 
 
 current talk of Christianity, and of its 
 
 ethic as the ethic of love. Augustine is 
 
 ignorantly quoted : " Love, and do as you 
 
 will!" John is wrested and debased: 
 
 " Who dwelleth in love dwelleth in God." 
 
 But there is more in love than passion, 
 
 however great or imaginative. The love 
 
 that hallows marriage has a moral nature 
 
 in it, and a moral society round it. And 
 
 Christianity is not the religion of love, but 
 
 of holy and therefore atoning love, which 
 
 makes it all the more divine as it makes it 
 
 less promptly popular. It is the religion of 
 
 a love which holds of the Eternal, and works 
 
 under moral and social conditions. And, 
 
 as such holy love, it is very different from 
 
 that natural and instinctive love which 
 
 makes literary capital or suits imaginative 
 
 purposes. So that it makes but poor 
 10 
 
146 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 stories, and prescribes a much more serious 
 ethic than we like in the hours when we 
 take refuge in fiction. 
 
 It is this moral and holy element in love 
 that is the Christian soul of married love at 
 last. We speak truly of Holy Matrimony. 
 It is this holy, this moral, element in mar- 
 riage that distinguishes it from mere con- 
 tract which unites natural instinct, pure 
 and steady as the instinct may often be. 
 And because of this moral element both 
 State and Church are not merely inter- 
 ested in marriage, but it is both a 
 churchly and a civil institution, even the 
 crucial meeting-point of State and Church 
 (as we shall soon see). And the object of 
 a religious ceremony in marriage is not 
 simply to make things sweet and decorous, 
 nor to be an opportunity for edification ; 
 but it moralises marriage from a height 
 where man has his final destiny in God, 
 and where the moral is the holy. 
 
 It is the way of the wild poet to speak 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 147 
 
 of love as a holy thing in itself. But it 
 is nothing of the kind, unless we reduce 
 religion to refined naturalism. Sacred 
 you may perhaps call it, but not holy. 
 And the new ethic, which is based on 
 naturalism, erotic, or pity, we have seen 
 going on to say not only that motherhood 
 is holy, but that all motherhood is holy, 
 that the right to a child belongs to every 
 woman, and that we should drop the 
 cruel bar that society places between 
 motherhood married and single. 
 
 Such extreme claims are truly not very 
 loud here, at least not yet ; but abroad 
 they are not only loud, but public and 
 powerful, promoted by most effective 
 writers of both sexes. And they will be 
 here ere long ; for the books are being 
 translated and preachers enlisted. Eng- 
 land does not get the first shock of 
 these revolutionary blasts, but they al- 
 ways reach us in the end. And we 
 ought to be ready in advance. And we 
 
148 THiE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 ought to be clear that sentiment is no 
 foundation for morals, that passion does 
 not contain its own law, that even proper 
 pity and private mercy for the misled 
 mother cannot prescribe the law of society 
 in such a central matter. 
 
 Let us use every kind of philanthropic 
 means to help the victims and mitigate 
 the curse. Let us see that the seducer 
 and deserter gets his due. But philan- 
 thropy is not ethic, pity is not morality ; 
 it certainly is not the base of public 
 morality ; and society cannot live on a 
 mercy which takes no note of the holy, 
 any more than a Church can. To much 
 love much is forgiven. But it has to be 
 forgiven. And a great love, if it be no 
 more than a passion, can lead men and 
 women into the very things which require 
 most forgiveness, and yet make public 
 forgiveness as hard as Christ's cross. Much 
 has to be forgiven in an agony by holy 
 love to guilty ; to a soul's supreme love 
 
THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 149 
 
 diverted upon man alone. The chief 
 guilt of most men is made by their 
 treatment of some form of love, human 
 or divine. And the great tragedy of 
 life is not the failure of love, but the 
 failure which led to it — the failure of 
 faith. 
 
 One thing more. It is easy for social 
 Pharisees or starveling natures to take 
 high and mighty ground on such matters, 
 and to lay down prescriptions and pro- 
 scriptions which in their spirit may be 
 farther than the sinners from the King- 
 dom of Heaven. It is hoped that nothing 
 here said may sound pitiless towards 
 those to whom, as Plato says, love comes 
 as a mania, on whom it lies like a doom, 
 and works as a Sapphic curse rather than 
 a Christian blessing. Let those who resent 
 the exigency of Christian ethic here re- 
 member that it came from no bloodless 
 spirit, but from the greatest Love that 
 ever entered history, and from its lovers, 
 
150 THE EFFECT OF LITERATURE 
 
 from the greatest Soul that ever sought 
 mankind, from One whose heart broke in 
 the passion of hallowing of that holy love 
 which it knew to be the most powerful, 
 priceless, and perfect thing in all the world, 
 and the guarantee of its richest and 
 conclusive bliss. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 TT is one of the unhappy features of 
 our time that the most deep and 
 far-reaching issues are referred for a verdict 
 to so many minds that have never 
 been taught by any due training to 
 realise their real ground and their im- 
 mense and searching effects, minds that 
 dismiss all that is not journalistic as 
 academic, and prefer the amateur to the 
 seer or the sage. The questions involved 
 in sex are among these. Next to 
 religion they raise the most momentous 
 and solemn issues for all history. 
 Most men who come to grief, it has 
 been said, wreck either upon God or 
 upon woman. And yet both orders of 
 question are handled, I do not say merely 
 
 161 
 
152 EPILOGUE 
 
 with a levity of manner, but with a levity 
 of mind which is not only unworthy but 
 incompetent and unfertile, and may en- 
 tail great peril for the future. I trust 
 these pages may contribute something 
 to mitigate the violence of this anomaly, 
 and to raise our interest to the range 
 and dignity of matters with which society 
 has so intimately and eternally to do. 
 
 Printtd by Hazell, Watson dt Yiney, Ld., London and Aykabury. 
 
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