The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1899. A MENACE TO FAMILY AND STATE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 49, 7 December 1899, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1899. A MENACE TO FAMILY AND STATE.

statisticians show that the dry rot has already set in in these colonies, and especially in New Zealand, in an altogether alarming decrease of the birth-rate. In this connection the Archbishop of Melbourne has done a real service both to the State and to society by his recent public denunciation of a company that was formed in his cathedral city — not by vulgar charlatans, but by high-placed people with the thin veneer of social ' respectability ' about them — for the purpose of winning dividends by Rystematising the practice of these pernicious principles regarding the duties and responsibilities of married life which involve one of the gravest violations of the moral law

If the ci?il law (paid his Grace) will not at present reach such efforts, it should be extended, so as to effectively suppress the organisation, and to put a stop to the vile literature connected with it. And what the law may not be able to accomplish for the present, public opinion shoul ( effect. The welfare of the State and the moral cleanness of society, apart altogether from the religious aspect of the question, should unite men of every denomination in trying to cut out this threatening social cancer.

The Archbishop's timely warning bore good fruit. The attention of the law authorities was directed to the new danger that menaced the sanctity of family life in Victoria. The publicity given to the neo-pagan movement proved too much for its promoters, and so the company was wound; up.

Ihe structure of Christian civilisation rests upon the foundation of the family, and the family upon the firm rock of an indissoluble and holy marriage tie. Everything that threatens either the indissolubility or the sanctity of the married relation menaces also the stability of the State. It is an old lesson. But it is a lesson that statesmen have been slow to learn. There probably never was a more brilliant civilisation and a wider culture than that of the Hellenic lace when it reached its apogee in the age of Pericles. But Greek civilisation and power fell to pieces none the less. Its fall dated from the spread of ideas that are sufficiently common nowadays — the doubting or denial of the bases of ordered human existence. This it was that ruined the sturdy national morality of old Greek life ; it ate into and severed the bonds which held citizen to citizen in the true relations of public and private relations and duties ; above all, it sapped the foundations of domestic life and let loose a flood of unexampled immorality. And so Greece fell. The Roman Empire was built upon broader and deeper foundations than the Greek. ' The root from which their vast growth of empire sprang,' says Lilly, 'was that distinctively virile quality which they called virtue : devotion to the idea of law ;md to the claims of country : to truth, to justice, to endurance :in a word, to duty, . , This prisca virtus it was that made them by veritable right divine " lords of the human race.'' ' In the old Roman State the husband always possessed the legal right of repudiation. But in the wholesome days of the Republic this right, says Lecky, was ' never or very rarely exercised.' The marriage bond was theoretically and legally soluble. In practice it was one and indissoluble. But in the time of the Empire the old virile days of plain living and high thinking disappeared. ' Faith and reverence and justice,' said Marcus Aurelius, 'have fled from the earth to Olympus.' Divorce became rampant. '1 he obligations of marriage,' says Lecky, ' were treated with extreme levity.' Such mighty leaders of the life and thought of the day as Cicero, M^cenas, Paulus 2Bmilius, etc., sought new nuptials without cause or on the flimsiest pretext or caprice. Says Lecky :

Martial speaks of a woman who had alre .dy arrived at her tenth husband ; Juvenal, of a woman having eight husbands in five years. But the most extraordinary recorded instance of this kind is related by St. Jerome, who assures us that there existed at Rome a wife who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself being in her twenty-first ye*r. These are, no doubt, extreme cases ; but it is unquestionable that the stability of married life was very seriously impaired.

The words of Euripides expressed the feeling of the corrupted masses of his day : ' Virtue is but a word, a delusion of nocturnal dreams.' The Italian chronicler Liutprand marks the sequel : In a few generations the name of Roman became a synonym for baseness, cowardice, avarice, debauchery, lying — a word that stood for every vice. And thus fell the vast fabric of the mighty Roman Empire whose sway was limited only by the bounds of the then known world.

We have said that statesmen are slow to learn the lesson that a holy and indissoluble monogamy is the firm foundation of the family and of the State. Others have, however, learned the lesson — to wit, those who would upset Christian civilisation and the present social order. They fully recognise the fact that to strike effectively at the structure of our present civilisation, they must begin by destroying the Christian conception of the family. Thus, in the French Revolution the National Convention revived the pagan idea of marriage, reduced it to a purely civil contract, terminable by the decree of a secular court. This was in Year I. of the Republic. In Year 11. they placed illegitimate children upon a footing of almost complete equality with those born in lawful wedlock, And their doctrinaires — such as Rousseau and Cambaceres — by speech and writing did what lay in their power to crush out of the hearts of the people every sentiment of religion which made for self-restraint, domestic morality, and a true home life. Christianity ennobled marriage into a sacred and sacramental contract, elevated woman, and made her the queen of the household. The Revolution sought to degrade woman to the position she held under paganism. Here is what Rousseau says :

Women are specially made to please men. . . All their education should be relative to men To pleaße them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honoured by them, to bring them up when young, to take care of them when grown up, to counsel, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and pleasant — these, in all ages, have been the duties of women, and it is for these duties that they should be educated from infancy.

Rousseau would, in addition, permit woman no religious freedom or rights of conscience. In a word, he would make her the slave and plaything of man. In the circumstances, there is a wondrous appositeness in the words of Merivale in his Conversion of the Northern Nations •.—. —

If a man denies Christianity, he will straightway deny the spiritual claims of woman. So threaten all modern unbelief and scepticism. To the woman, the denial of the Gospel would be at once a fall from the consideration she now holds among us. She would descend again to be the mere plaything of man. the transient companion of his leisure hour, to be held loosely as the chance gift of a capricious fortune.

There is much in the intellectual and moral condition of our time which recalls, by no undue stretch of fancy, the decadent state of Rome before its fall. We have around us a like decay of supernatural belief ; a contempt for authority in religion ; a similar doubt or denial of the bases of the moral order ; a similar disregard of the unity and sanctity of the marriage bond ; an even more portentous rebellion against the most sacred duties and responsibilities of wedlock. If the family is the foundation and morality the strength of a nation, those are, collectively, the symptoms which might lead us to not unreasonably anticipate a great social upheaval. If it comes, it will be complete and terrible. For — in the words of Lilly — ' the destroyers would not be simple and uncorrupted races, with strong, broad notions of right and wrong, with keen susceptibility to the influences of religion, but decivilised men, emancipated from moral and spiritual restraints, and ruled solely by brute instincts and passions :

Unfettered by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes.'