MODERN MARRIAGE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18273, 14 December 1922, Page 9

MODERN MARRIAGE.

DIVORCES CONDEMNED.

CLERGYMAN SPEAKS OUT.

"CRY OF THE SENSUALIST." [from our own correspondent.] SYDNEY, Dec. 3. A prominent Sydney cleric, Archdeacon Martin, has made .an interesting contribution to -the controversy on modern marriage, and has censured the press for the prominence given to the views of (the visiting novelist, Mr. Robert KeaWe, author of "Simon Called Peter."

Regarding Mr. Keablo himself, the speaker said he always had .grave doubts about ex-clergymen, who, having taken sacred vows, not only turned their backs upon them, but upon the great truth of religion itself. The agitation for easy divorce, h 0 said, was no new thing. It was centuries old, and had led not only to the breaking up of family life, but the breaking up of empires. Our civilisation was founded on family life. Mr. Keable said that if married people did not love one another, yet continued to live together, it was gros3 immorality. "Well," asked the archdeacon, "what is it when they cease to live together:' In eight years there has been 3054 divorces in this State. Each of these divorced persons, he claimed, on 155 authority of Christ's teaching, was living in adultery if he or she re-married. "I look upon divorce as an attempt to give respectability to adultery, nothing elso," he said.

Speaking generally on the subject, Archdeacon Martin. Baid that the attacks on marriage were attacks on the home and the family, and it might be noticed that these attacks were almost entirely attacks on the Bible and the Church. All revolutions based on injustice and class legislation had sought to destroy the Bible and the Church. He had the deepest sympathy with men who earned their bread and butter, but he had no sympathy with the selfish cry of men who look for nothing outside their own class. Extremists of tins character had done tremendous harm to the working men of Australia, and if the Labour movement to-day could purify itself of this element he felt convinced it would cany everything before it. At present the cry seemed to be the same as it was in the French and Russian Revolutions— "Down with the Church!"

The cry of easy divorce, of free love, and trial marriages was merely the cry of the sensualist, he maintained. Divorce lowered the standard of the people.