“PAGAN” MARRIAGES

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 October 1928, Page 2

“PAGAN” MARRIAGES

IS AMERICA CHRISTIAN ? NEW YORK, August 1. The “present deplorable conditions of marriage and divorce” in the United States are the subject of remarkable criticism by one of New York’s leading churchmen. A year ago the Rev. Dr. Caleb R. Stetson, Rector of Trinity Church, .caused a sensation by his attack on modern marriages as “pagan” in their impermanence and lack of sacred significance, and vulgar in their ostentation. In his annual message this year he goes a step further. He announces that participants in a wedding cereihiony at Trinity must first sign a “marriage blank,” by which he seeks to ensure the sacredness of the sacrament. The blank, which is headed with the statement, “This church does not solemnise the marriage of divorced or unbaptised persons,” demands the statement of both participants that they have been baptised, have never been divorced, are of legal age, and enter the marriage of their own free will, “without any outside influence or coercion whatsoever.” This unusual announcement occurs in the Rector’s statement in the 1928 year book of Trinity parish. It carries out the argument made in the same place in last year’s publication that church marriage limited to undivorced

and baptised Christians is an antidote to the growing “breakdown -or family life.” Dr. Stetson advises all clergymen to urge non-Christians to be wedded by a civil officer, and asserts that Church and State should be separated in the function of marrying. He arraigns the “present deplorable -conditions of marriage and divorce” in the United States, instancing weddings in lions’ cages, “Tom Thumb” weddings, marriages in balloons and aeroplanes, as “attractions” to various public enterprises. Dr. Stetson asserts: “This is no longer a Christian country, and we cannot expect that Christian moral standards will be accepted or followed by the majority.”