The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 1907. DIVORCE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 08, Issue 32, 8 August 1907, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 1907. DIVORCE

fOME fifteen months ago a strong attack by the Wellington Council of the Evangelical > Churches led us to recommend the members of that body to take their eyes out of their slippers and cast a glance' around their own spiritual households. ' They may ', said we, ' _possibly find things- there that matter a good deal. What, for instance, about tlie spreading indilierentism and infidelity ' and divorce • and race-suicide that are eating like rodent ulcers into faith and family life ? ' Last week the Council dealt with the ' very grave scandal ' of divorce. The discussion that ensued took crystallised forrq in tne tollowing resolution :— ' Whereas " the law, relating to the restitution of conjugal rights proves to be a very short cut to divorce, which was probably nofc the intention of the Legislature, it is desirable that the law be so amended as 1 , while retaining the right of action for alimony, to prevent the issue of any order disobedience to which would be equivalent to five years' or any other period of desertion.' ' The Rev. Mr. North ', says the ' Times ' report, ' quoted figures to show that since the Amending Acts had been given force to, the "number of divorces had quadrupled '. The resolution was well taken— as far as it went. But it did not go far enough. We prefer the radical surgery that gets its bold scalpel to the root of this social ulcer than the timid dilettantism that rests satisfied with reducing somewhat the ring of its rodent spread.' There was a truer and bolder ring in the words of one of the speakers, our old friend, the Rev. Dr. Gib*. ' The sanctity of the marriage bond ', said he, ' is practically the foundation of all progress and social well-feeing, and it seems to me that the

present trend is in the direction' of the' old-time paganism '. a It seems to us a pity that the Council, when', it took the matter up, did not start at the foundation principles underlying this grave and growing scandal of divorce. The structure of Christian civilisation rests upon the foundation of , the family. And the family rests upon the firm rock of a holy, indissoluble and single family tie. Everything that threatens either the unity, sanctity, and indissolubility of the marriage relation menaces also the stability of the State. It is an old lesson. But it is a lesson that many poli« ticians seem to have forgotten, and most of the Reformed denominations never to have quite learned. The revival of divorce in modern Christian society had for its tap-root the loose teachings of the ' Reformers ' regarding the unity, sacramental character, and life-long binding of the marriage tie. There are, doubtless, other causes which contribute in their measure to aggravate this growing menace to domestic life and to social well-being. But there lies ' the main cause. Another is to be found in some of the evil political principles that Europe has inherited from the French Revolution. We have said that many politicians seem to have lost sight of the position which a holy and inflissoluble monogamy holds as the firm foundation of the family and of the State. Others, however, have learned the lesson and retained it — namely, those who would upset Christian civilisation and the Christian' social order on which it has been built up. They fully realise the fact that to strike effectively at the structure of Christian civilisation, they must begin by destroying the Christian idea 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 court. And the doctrinaires of the Revolution, such as Rousseau and Cambaceres, did by speech and writing the utmost that lay in their power to crush out of the hearts of the people every sentiment of religion which made for selfrestraint, domestic morality, and a true and clean home life. The Catholic Church ennobled marriage into a sacred and sacramental contract", elevated woman from the position of a chattel, and made her the queen of the household. The Revolution sought to degrade woman to the position that she held under paganism. In the ' Taming of the Shrew ' the coarse-grained husband says of his wife :— ' I will be master of what is mine own ; She is my goods, my chattels ; she is my house, My household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.' The Revolution devised a still deeper depth for woman, which, found expression in lines of Rousseau's that are too coarse for reproduction in the pages of a paper intended for family reading. It gives a point and an appositeness to the following words of Merivale in his ' Conversion of the Northern Nations ' :— llf 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.' The first step towards a true and radical remedy for the social plague of divorce would be the return of the Reformed creeds to the Catholic teaching in regard to marriage. This has been well realised by Mrs. Chapman, a non-Catholic writer, in her work, ' Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction ', published in 1897. The only way ', says she, ' to restore honor and dignity to marriage is to make it indissoluble, and to convert all men and women, Christian and agnostic, to the belief that it is a Sacrament '. Till the Councils of the Churches take heart of grace and get back to

this teaching as their starting-point, all their resolutions against the mere excrescences of the divorce- evil will no more touch the root of the cancerous spot than if they were to parade around it with sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.