STEPPING-STONES OVER BIG DIFFICULTIES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XV, Issue 40, 27 January 1888, Page 11

STEPPING-STONES OVER BIG DIFFICULTIES.

ROUND ABOUT HELL. (By Rev. Father Cassidy, New Plymouth.) ( Continued.') We can easily imagine the tide of pain and misery that surged through the noble soul of Panthea during the brief interval of her tragic widowhood. We see here bursting from that marble lock of benighted paganism, a crystalline fountain of marvellous devotedness and affection that shames the waters of the society in which we move. We see here unselfish nature coming from the depths of this heathen soil and displaying in unmistakeable terms the true basis on which every matrimonial union should rest. What a cloud of infamy hangs over so many pretended nuptials of our boasted civilisation ; how unnatural, how farcical do they not, some of them, appear when side by side with that of the darkest ages of the past. How few husbands would now die for their wives, how few wives would sacrifice themselves for love of their husbands. In the light even of paganism we feel ashamed, and in the order of nature we seem degenerating, for how many of our marriages of the present day are but mockeries and farces. It is not men and women who marry women and men. No, it is a long banking account they marry or a fine house, or a bit of mad, or a Government billet, a brass helmet, or a fresh diploma. They do not want to unite with each other but with something else, and so they do, and it is scarcely fair to call such a union marriage — no matter what custom, fashion, or civilisation may say to the contrary, fot great nature is there to contradict the mockery. And we class such an nnion under the sacred name of marriage. We might almost as well say a man is married to his dinner because he enjoys it, or to his Waterbnry because it hums a solo for him, and tells him now and •gain the hours, or to his overcoat because it shakes off the storm, or that a woman is married to her mantilla because her friends

admire it, or to her seal-ekin because it keeps her warm, or to her poodle because he kisses her hand with rapturous affection or delights her mind by his matchless sagacity. W here there is no similarity of mind or feeling, where there is no natural adaptation of soul and body, where there is no mutual affection, or in a word, where there is nothing whatever to mutually harmonise, then a natural union is clea-iy impossible, and a happy one equally so. For is it not unreasonable to expect that the registrar's certificate or the wedding dinner could overthrow the whole laws of nature, upset the decrees of Heaven, blindfold the man or woman for life, or that they would give them natures they never had, give them affections for each other they coald never give, or could unite them in peace and love who were not united in anything ? For an unnatural marriage must necessarily be an unhappy one, and an unhappy one may be justly characterised as the hottest Gehenna on this planet, a Gehenna where thousands of men are roasted and millions of women are grilled whose red-hot iron bars and scalding tears are God's proclamation of their nnnaturaloess. There is one universal law encircling creation that tells us that things that have no sympathy, affinity or similaity with each other, can never unite or harmonize, and if they are ever brought in close proximity to each other, it is only to suffer or to separate. In all the realms of nature we find this principle unbending and true. Light and darkness will not unite, fire and water will not unite, and in the whole vegetable and animal world every union is based on the principle of mutual fitness and similarity, and it is only when natures are adapted for each other that any union takes place. If we look at every form of vegetable life, from the moss tbat clasps and creeps along the lifeless rocks to the towering giant of the forest, we will find this universal law fulfilled and followed. We will find it, too, preserved in all its sacredness in the whole domain of the animal creation, and the poor perching wanderers of the wing that a year or two were not, and in a year or two will be forgotten, forever will sing and chaunt it in their strange wild song of gladness or sorrow in every glen and city, in every village and homestead, from every tree and mountain and river of the wide, wide world. Man alone in his folly or in his malice seems the only violator of this law, and man alone seems to suffer the consequences of a law that everywhere mauif ests itself. For long before nature awakens in the animal creation moial consciousness, an idea of beauty, of goodness and superiority, we find her stamping ■ n the brute creation the tendency of kindred natures, and of kindred natures only, united. We findthatasthe atiimal life rises in the scale of excellence we find it clinging to this principle more and more, and we find it everywhere, no matter how feebly or foicibly still pointing to the social arrangements tuat should form the natural code by which the unions of the human species should be regulated and baaed upon. That union which should exist between natural beings, to be considered natural and legitimate, should rest on the basis of supreme affection,that necessarily implies similarity of natures, kindred mental and physical adaptations. Whoever looks through the eyes of sense or science at the world, they will find it and all its surroundings made of a piece ; they will trace no half joints in. it, or see nature ever contradicting herself but will discover her ever asserting, through the different tribe, of sentient creatures, that the only basis of union is bimilanty of part with part, and will convince them that God Himself ha 9 pl.nied in the human heart mutual affection as the foundation on whicn every union in the human race should rest. Truer to the dictates of nature and the sacredneas of instinct than our more enlightened century, the noble pagans of the darker ages of iren rule and rougher destiny lived. The only basis on which a matrimonial union rested true and just with them was the basis of a supreme affection. Ihis is the lesson the dead ashes of Panthea and Abradatus teach us ; this is tbe lesson that old Valerius Maximas would have us ever remember when he lells us how Cornelia, the wife of Titus Gracchus, refused the hand of Ptolemy, King of Egypt. "The buried ashes," he says, " of her husband seemed to lie so cold on her heart that the splendour of a diadem and all tbe pomps of a rich kingdom were not able to warm it so as to make it capable of receiving the impression of a new love." It is the principle that Pliny the younger has evidently followed, since, writing of his wife, he says, "she loves me— that is the surest pledge of her virtue. She has a wonderful disposition for learning, which she has acquired from her affection for me. She is constantly reading my writings, constantly studying them and getting them by heart ; from these instances I take the most certain omens of our perpetual and increasing happiness, since her affection is not founded upon my youth or person, which must gradually decay, but she is in love with the immortal part of me." In the debris and rubbish of fallen Borne we find many such noble proofs of the pagan faith in the necessity of a supreme affection. We find there, in the smouldering ashes of the long^forgotten past, gems that sparkle still, and sparks chat Bhed a lustre and excite admiration wherever they fall. But there is no century or land that cannot furnish noble examples of the existence of supreme affection and its indomitable power ; no matter where or how we turn our face we will see some striking proofs of its magnificence. Every city and town, every .village and homestead, every lake and liver, and bay and ocean, every graveyard and every ruin, every prison and hospital, every hill and valley could tell us tales of affection's power that would excite the admiration of every feeling being. No wonder Carlyle, stern Scotchman, but Jgentlenatured as a seraph, wept over Queret Demery's letter to his wife. When the Bastile |fell by the thunders of the French Revolution, strange secrets came to light, and long buried despair found expression. Amid the ruins of this tower of tyranny we find a tattered piece of flimsy paper and written carefully on it, " If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake of God and the most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my dear wife, were it only her name on a card to show that she is alive, it, were the greatest consolation I could receive, and I should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur." " Poor prisoner," says Carlyle, "who namest thyself Queret Demery and hast no other history ; she is dead, and thou art dead," (To be continued.)