The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1898. A GROWING EVIL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 30, 1 December 1898, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1898. A GROWING EVIL.

§HERE is a Will-o'-the-Wisp idea abroad that is leading people in this Colony and elsewhere , into queer places. Its baleful and misleading glimmer is in the school, the pulpit, and the home. Our public-school system is regarded by many as the sheet-anchor of the State. But what are our State schools doing ? Not cultiV* vating the heart and affections, or inculcating the principles of right conduct. These things are brought under the spell of a grand tupu in the interests of a noisy minority of secularists, aided and abetted by the votes of pious Christians who, in effect, believe in religion only one day in the week. No. Our State schools are hammering into the youthful brain, ding-dong, from Monday morning till Friday afternoon, the great idea that the whole scope of the three R's and all the rest — their be-all and end-all — is to prepare Tomxy and Harry and Emma and Kate to * geb on ' — to ' make a pile,' if may be, in the not too distant by-and-by. And in the home, how many are not perhaps in words, but in effect, dinning the same sordid lesson into their children's minds, although they may not put it with the coarse blantness of one of Ben. Jonson's characters — Get money : still get money, boy, No matter by what means. Oh, the 'siller' is everything. And how often — in Dunedin, in Auckland, in Wellington, and more recently still on the West Coast — has the non-Catholic pulpit resounded with nauseous and fallacious comparisons between the poverty of Spain and the wealth of John Bull ? Callow pulpiteers raise the cry that the test of true religion is not personal and national virtue, but personal and national wealth — big warships, great trade, buzzing wheels, mansions, liveried footmen, velvet-pile carpets, soft divans, and bloated moneybags. The only road to Heaven known to the Saviour of the world was a narrow and uphill and thorny one. Our fledgeling pulpiteer would lead his people to a Jin-ch-siklc Valhalla in a boudoir-car.

It is bad enough, iv all reason, to have the principles of moral decay at work in the grown tree. With us the dry-rot is at work iv the saplings of the State-school nursery. We have many a time and oft pointed out the grotesque absurdity of supposing that, either in the individual or the nation, the mere possession of a well-lined fob is any evidence that the beliefs or morals are likewise therefore right. Beneath the roseate surface of ill-distributed wealth there lie evils that are preying ou the very vitals of

Great Britain and the United States, and, in their measure, on these colonies as well. We refer in particular to the spread of divorce. Nobody needs to be reminded that the family is the foundation of the State. And the increasing laxity of divorce is fast parting the bonds that hold the family together. Keen observers look with deep uneasiness at the drift of divorce legislation. The eminent Protestant writer, Professor Goldwin Smith, said three years ago of America : —

Of all the thunder-clouds none is darker or more charged with ruin than this [the growing laxity of divorce legislation]. The responsibility, so far as it is legislative, rests not only on those legislatures which have perilously relaxed the divorce law, but upon jurists who, carried away by the generous desire of emancipating the wife from the domination of the husband, have broken up the legal and economical unity of a family. To preserve its integrity, the family needs a headship. The necessity may be unwelcome, but it seems to be the fiat of nature.

The future of the State, the standard of conjugal morality, the family tie itself, depend virtually on the incidents of marriage. Among these colonies, New South Wales has already attained a bad notoriety through legislative tampering with the unity and indissolubility of the marriage tie. New Zealand has quite recently been experimenting along the lines of greater laxity.

The fact is, we are plainly verging, in divorce-legislation, to pagan principles. The so-called ' right ' of divorce was practically unlimited in pagan Rome. Men of even the type of Maecenas continually changed their wives. Women displayed almost equal alacrity in repudiating their husbands. The evil became so rampant and shameless that, according to Seneca, there were women who reckoned their years rather by their husbands than by the consuls. The stability of married life was shaken, and the State, as a consequence, tottered to an inglorious fall. Against these lax and ruinous principles the Catholic Church waged from the first an implacable war. The struggle was long, but in the end she won. She taught the sacramental character of marriage ; that it is the symbol of the perpetual union of the one Christ with His Spouse the one Church ; that it is a life-long contract ; and. that no power on earth can dissolve the bond of a ratified and consummated marriage between baptised persons. Laxity of ideas regarding the permanency and unity of the marriage bond crept in again with the Reformation. It has been steadily growing for three centuries since. Luther permitted PnrLir of Hesse to have two wives at the same time. He laid down the the broad principle, says the German Protestant writer Bax, that ' a man should rather have a plural ty of \\ ives than that he should put away any of them.' As for the English Reformation : it had its origin in the Pope's stem refusal to permit Henry VIII. to exchange a faithful but faded consort of forty-three for the fresh charms of beauty still in its teens. Henry's divorce, the Christian Rembrancor admits (vol. 50, p. 887), ' was almost the sole cause of the English Reformation.'

Evidence of the growth of the divorce-evil is not far to seek. Figures are available in melancholy abundance. Let some of the figures given by the prominent New York Protestant divine, Rev. B. F. De Costa suffice —

We know (said he in St. John's Church, New York, on September 24) how this evil has spread in New England, and now the latest figures show that in Ohio 3,279 divorces were granted during the past year. Over 7,000 applications were filed in a single year. In twenty years no ftwer than 328,710 divorces were granted in the United States, showing the hideous character of the evil, which in rapidly turning this country into one vast ' disorderly house.' There is a loud call for legislation on the part of the General Convention for a law prohibiting the marriage of any divorced person whatsoever. Protestantism is largely responsible for this state of things, having deliberately degraded marriage from its true sacramental plane and unloosed the monster now praying upon society.

The London Tablet of November 9, 1890, recorded the celebration in a non-Catholic church of the marriage of a woman who had three living husbands. And there is nothing in the nutr.re of the divorce laws to prevent the recurrence of the extraoidinury instance recorded by St. Jerome (Ep. 2) of a pagan Roman woman of his day who was married to her twenty-third husband, of whom she was the twenty-first wife. Family ties may be effectually impaired without the occurrence of abnormal scandals. To the pagan mind of Seneca the divorce evil was a grief and

a shame. In a country calling itself Christian it is, in its present — and yet growing— dimensions, an abomination. Flinging stones at Spain is cheap and easy. "Grapling with this dread evil is quite another matter. AndTt is greatly to be feared that the young generation that is imbibing the secularism of the State-school system will rather aggravate than remedy a state of things that for us in these colonies begins already to present a sufficiently unpleasant aspect.

The matter is being fiercely agitated at the present time in England and the United States. Unfortunately the leaders of the non-Catholic denominations have set the seal of their approval on the marriage of at least * the innocent party' to a divorce. Such a distinction is unknown either to Scripture or to hisory. Moreover the ' innocent party ' — who is most frequently the husband — is in many cases the more guiliy of the two. Happily there is a healthy minority of the Anglican and the American Episcopalian Churches who hold firmly, with Catholics, the indissol ability of the marriage bond. But we state it with regret : the bulk of the Piotestant denominations are satisfied to accept the condition of things imposed by secularist legislators, with, perhaps, at best or worst, a word of mild and ineffective disapproval. The divorce laws have, in effect, altered the character of Christian marriage, and substituted for it a relation different in ground and nature. As to the moral effect, the late Mr. Gladstone spoke as follows after nearly sixty years' experience in the centre of British life :— In the year 1857 the English Divorce Act -was passed, for England only. Unquestionably, since that time the standard of conjugal morality has perceptibly declined among the higher classes of this country, and scandals in respect to it have become more frequent. The decline I believe to be due in part to this great innovation on our marriage laws. Divorce of any kind impairs the integrity of the family. 4 Divorce with re-marriage,' says the same great statesman, ' destroy it root and branch.'