Mr Moody on Divorce.

White Ribbon, Volume 2, Issue 23, 1 May 1897, Page 10

Mr Moody on Divorce.

Mr Moody, the celebrated preacher, has been conducting a mission in the largest public hall in Boston, Mass., and he astonished and startled an immense audience by the following observation : “ Now’, I w’ant to say to you wives, if you know that your husbands are living impure lives, get a divorce. A man has no business to be living in impurity and expect his w’ife to live with him. “ 4 Oh,' you say, 4 such preaching will break up our homes.’ What of it ? Some ought to be broken up. There

are too many men living double lives, and they ought to lx? unmasked. 44 But I tell you, wives, you have the power to save your impure husbands. Refuse to live w r ith them, and they’ll give up their sin. If women w f ould only stand up for their rights, we should not have so many impure men. • • This outspoken utterance has stirred Boston tremendously. The 44 Daily Transcript ” says:— 44 It is really to prevent divorce, not to promote it, that the great popular preacher spoke. It is certainly not disintegrating to family life to preach an expansion of the old idea that a man’s 4 honour ’ in monogamous marriage rests w’ith his wafe, and that his behaviour concerns her quite as much as hers concerns him. Not even the mostjConservative critics can object to this advice given to wives in Boston to decline to countenance or permit conditions not only illegal, but against both private and public saf- ty and happiness.” * • • Mr Moody’s observation is the first instance that I remember of the recognition by a man of the fact that divorce has a penal aspect for men as well as for women. With a curious unanimity men, from the most coarse to the most respectable, when discussing divorce, assert that women only w’ould suffer from its being made easy, for (the foundation of the argument is) married men are only too pleased to be rid of their wives, while the wives’ interests are wholly bound up in clinging on to un- ! walling husbands. But this is not true. Men are generally unwilling to have a fairly happy and well-managed home broken up, to be separated from their children or to have those children left motherless, and to know’that their misconduct is made public ; and they are as much punished by divorce as women are. The infamous provision of our own divorce lav;, under which a wife cannot divorce her husband for even gross and open infidelity, tor even infidelity under her own roof, is maintained by men because they fear that | wives would avail themselves of the fear of divorce in husbands' minds to check those immoralities that are so rampant in our midst ; and they do not want such a check to exist. Unquestionably, to equalise the divorce laws in England, so that a w ife could divorce an unfaithful husband, would greatly tend to moralise our society. It would give wives, as Mr Moody says, 44 the power to save ” husbands who are en- i

couraged to vice by the immunity from all punishment given them by the present state of the law.— Womans Signal.