DIVORCE PROBLEM

Taranaki Daily News, 24 August 1931, Page 11

DIVORCE PROBLEM

EFFECT ON CHILDREN.

DUTIES OF PARENTS.

Speaking on the question of divorce, Canon Percival James, of Wellington, in the course of an address to the Masterton branch of the League of Mothers, stated that it was constantly being said, “What of those unhappy marriages between ill-assorted couples with incompatible temperaments? And what of those tragic failures where there has never been true love between man and wife, or where the conduct of one or of both has killed any love that ever existed? Do you insist upon pretending that people must ever remain fettered in what was but a mockery of a marriage?” Canon James said that whatever the secular State might think it right to do, reflecting as the State did the average standard of citizens, organised Christianity must stand for the principle that marriage was a permanent contract, not a temporary convenience so long as the parties were attractive to each other, which meant in practice so long as the woman was attractive to the man. When lax theories of marriage were allowed to gain a foothold, laxcr principles would inevitably follow. Advocates of divorce often forgot two things —first, the duty of the so-called innocent or injured party to go to the utmost lengths to forgive, and second, the supreme duty of parents to the children whom they had brought into the world. There was no more pitiful result of separation and divorce than the lives of little children blighted at the outset by the selfishness of one or both of those who should have been their natural protectors.

The new freedom of the young of both sexes was good, the speaker declared, if it were not abused. It demanded a nigh standard in both young man and girl. It rested with the mothers to plant in the breasts of their boys a high standard of chivalry and in their girls a high standard of modesty. In concluding his address Canon James dwelt on the necessity for discipline in the home, which was really the protection the children had a- right to expect from their parents.. ( .