MARRIAGE IN CHRISTENDOM.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20354, 10 March 1928, Page 18

MARRIAGE IN CHRISTENDOM.

LESSONS FROM PAGANISM. SWEDEN’S MODIFICATION OF MONOGAMY. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 10. ‘‘Education for Marriage ” was the sub' ji-ct of an address by Captain Pitt-Rivers to tho Eugenios Society at the resumed annual conference of educational associations at University College, London. Captain Pitt-Rivers said that in this supposedly scientific age it remained a melancholy fact that the regulation of marriage and texnal relationships was constantly being undertaken or advocated by persons who ignored, or were totally ignorant of, even the most elementary facts that biological and psychological sciences had laboriously accumulated. The constant clamour for tho reform of our marriage and divorce laws, for tho suppression of prostitution, for campaigns against venerea! disease, the cries for ” women’s rights, " the agitations in favour of the “ equality of the sexes ” and for raising the female “ age of consent,” the patent and übiquitous evidences of sexual pathology and perversions, of mantal unhappiness, of imposed celibacy, and the incessant talk about sex antagonism were tacit admissions that all was not well with marriage in Christendom. There were valuable psychological lessons to be learned in the study of pagan •marriage systems which threw light upon our problems. In the past history of our culture we were taught to invest the whole subject of sex with a cloak of horror, mystery, and contempt. It became an accepted axiom that it must not be spoken of or referred to seriously. Tho only reference to it that was even to-day normally tolerated must be bv sly allusion or lascivious jest. Any “decent ” referferenco to sex was looked upon aa “ indecent,” and any indirect lewd reference as witty and therefore to be tolerated. While the subject bad been driven underground it had become not loss prominent in men's minds, but less wholesome and more distorted. They would, no doubt, be told that tho need for a more onen and scientific altitude was not beginning to be recognised and that sex education was already beginning to be incorporated in school curriculums. A FORM OP CONCUBINAGE. For this to he true would require a revolution in ethics and the adoption of natmaliso values. In place of the inculcation of elementary biological and physiological knowledge, when instruction in sexual hygiene was given at all, emphasis rather tended to he placed upon the awful results of sexual curiosity and experience. Physical training and competitive games were often advocated not because they were merely healthful, but as a tvropliv'&xis jig.ttiJihfc SGXU3.I developmentIt was the depreciation and renression of fema'e sexuality which was at tho root of the bankruptcy of the Christian monogamous marriage. That it would have eventually to be modified there were strong indications The facts of tho sex-ratio and of a growing, though not as yet very intelligent or conscious, revolt against existing condition- must sooner or later bring it'"about Sweden had -already taken a sten in according legal recognition to unions outside marriage and it might be in the direction of a form of concubinage that env present marriage system would be modified.