MARRIAGE PROBLEMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 195, 19 August 1927, Page 16

MARRIAGE PROBLEMS.

DOCTOR'S LECTURE TO YOUNG MEN. MORALITY AXD SELF-RESTRAINT.

Vital truths of life were frankly, yet delicately handled in a lecture which Dr. William Pettit, a well-known Auckland medical practitioner, gave on Wednesdav in the Y.M.C.A. hall. Mr. V. T. Drew presided over an audience which numbered nearly 250. The chairman explained that the lecture was the last of a series on home building for young men contemplating matrimony, and that on account of his fitness for handling problems of an intimate nature—fitness made manifest by the doctor's sterling work during the war —be had been specially invited to discuss the vital problems of marriage as they affected young men. r Dr. Pettit, who was received with applause, soon established an atmosphere of friendly informality in the well filled hall. He said many unhappy marriages were the result of ignorance. Too often vital matters of sex were learnt from undesirable and polluted sources in childhood and early adolescence through the indifference or lack of moral courage of parents. The fact that the marriage tie was becoming too lightly regarded was also a cause of the increasing number of unsatisfactory unions. men must realise that marriage was in" dissoluble, that it involved as great restraint as a pure single life, *ui*l a happy home could only be established on the foundations of mutual sacrifice and forbearance. Importance of Home Life, The home was the basic unit of society and no nation could grow great unless the home life of its people was based 011 moral principles and not simply on the observance of physical laws. The lecturer said he was old-fashioned enough to believe that the husband should still maintain his position as head of the family, and that his chief duty should be to inculcate a healthy discipline into the young growing child, which would enable it to weather safelv the stormy years of adolescence. Mail was meant to live a life which was moral as well as physical, and 110 man could hope to live a" full life unless he put God in /the supreme place in his home, and erected an altar to the external truths of the Christian moral law. Touching on the question of mixed marriages the lecturer said that, while he was not there to dogmatise, far too many marriages contracted between parties of different religious denominations had proved unsatisfactory. He would advise against mixed marriages, as it was essential that the father and mother of a family should experience a sense of spiritual unity. He considered it essential that the spiritual plane should be placed above the mere physical plane in married life. Marriage was the harmonious blending of two souls, not merely a civil contract. In reply to a question the doctor made it clear that, while birth control by scientific means might be of value in certain individual cases, more harm than good would undoubtedly be done by disseminating such knowledge broadcast. In the practice of his profession he had often encountered large families where it was difficult to see how a satisfactory standard of living was maintained on the small wages at present earned, but to his mind artificial restriction in the size of families was not birth control, but racial suicide.