The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1920. A GREAT SACRAMENT

New Zealand Tablet, 30 September 1920, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1920. A GREAT SACRAMENT

~ - JfllH H S, RE J S 110 , need to recapitulate here what f'W llE 1 RES lieedto recapitulate alone, has I, V l6 Church, and the Church alone, has done for woman. A superficial acquaintance Wlth the leading currents of history 18 enou S h to show how Christianity raised y woman from the slavery and degradation ' °1 ler existence in pagan times, freed her from an ignoble and debased thraldom and set her in her rightful place beside man, as sister, wife, daughter, friend: a child of God redeemed by the Blood of Christ. Woman found her soul under the influence of Christianity and was no longer a chatel and an instrument of pleasure. The ennobling and refining power of religion took in hand the sternest qualities of the barbarians who came under the influence of the Church and moulded the chivalry of medieval Europe into a marvellous, ..tender, beautiful force which elevated and protected woman and looked beyond the individual to the great type and model, Mary, the Mother of God. The autocratic sway

of the husband" and father was broken in the household, and homes became the centres of warm, strong virtues and the shrines of pure love, out of which radiated the regenerating currents that reformed society and reduced the savagery, of paganism to order and gentleness, removing chaos and establishing cosmos. Christian doctrines and the zeal of ten thousand preachers could never have done this so effectively had not the Church, begun in the home and crowned wifehood and motherhood with a dignity never dreamed of in past ages. And the Church could never have conferred this dignity if she had not reformed marriage and made it a bulwark against licence and the barbarism that licence begets. Solas cum sola pro semper: the marriage of one man with one woman until death should part them, was Christ's precept, and in it lies the foundation and the security of all society which is built on the units of family life.

On this principle the Church is inexorable. The sanctity of the marriage bond, and the firmness of that bond, are on a plane above discussion. The passions of men have time and again rebelled against this restraint; a Henry VIII. or a Frederick have defied the power which would not yield to their demands; heretics have curried the favor of princes by trampling on the law of God in deference lo their lusts; but the Church has maintained intact and pure the teaching of Christ on the nature of Christian marriage, the pledge of good morals and the corner stone of healthy social life. True to the principles of the Reformation Protestant legislators have continued to permit divorce, even when they protest against the evil results which are overwhelming modern society. Anglican bishops argue nowadays that Christ intended marriage to be an indissoluble monogamy; but an Act of Parliament overrides their scruples, and they pay the penalty incurred by Luther when he broke the tables of the law of God for the favor of a king. In America divorce has become so common that morals are only a name and the union of man and wife is but a matter of traffic. Years ago Madame de Stael wrote of Protestant Germany: "It cannot be denied that in the Protestant provinces the facility of divorce is injurious to the sanctity of marriage. They change husbands as quietly as if they were arranging the incidents of a drama !" The greatest and most sacred of contracts is thus reduced to a drama—to a farce, we should say, were it not for its tragic consequences for modern society. Here is another of the glorious results of that Reformation which made every man his own interpreter of the Bible and set people to find out in that most difficult and sacred Book pretexts to justify any enormity they wished to commit. The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose: the Reformers made his work easy when they gave the same devil's licence to every man who could get his hands on a Bible. The Protestants attacked the Church when they made of marriage a secular bargain, like the selling and buying of a sheep; but their attack left the Church untouched and brought down in awful ruin the pillars of modern society. To the fact that profane hands were laid on the "great Sacrament" which is the image of Christ's mystical union with His spouse, the Church, most of the anarchy and most of the appalling rottenness of social conditions in our day are due. The great Sacrament was profaned; and a great punishment has fallen on the profaners.