n
to overcome the virtue of young educated girls struggling alone in
London, and often half starving on the miserable pittance which is all
they can earn. But still more is it shown in the life of the nation
which tampers with the laws of marriage and admits freedom of divorce.
Either such suits must be heard _in camera_ without the shame of
exposure, when divorce is so facilitated that the family and the State
rest rather on a superstructure of rickety boards than on a rock; or
they must be heard in public court and form a moral sewer laid on to the
whole nation, poisoning the deepest springs of its life, and through
that polluted life producing far more individual misery than it
endeavors to remedy in dissolving an unhappy marriage. God only knows
what I suffered when a _cause celebre_ came on, and I felt that the
whole nation was being provided with something worse and more vitally
mischievous than the most corrupt French novel.

Deeply do I regret--and in this I think most thoughtful minds will agree
with me--that the Reformers in their inevitable rebound from the
superstitions of Rome, rejected her teaching of the sacramental nature
of marriage, which has made so many Protestant nations tend to that
freedom of divorce which is carried to so great an extent in some parts
of America, and is spreading, alas! to many of our own colonies--a
laxity fatally undermining the sanctity and stability of the family. If
marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?

I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching
to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching
of modern fiction--even of so great a novelist as George Meredith--which
inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the
higher law of love, or rather, passion. In teaching your sons, and
especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this
specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but
on duty. To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of
sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind. There is
but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast
relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires,
to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities
of life can be built--duty. When this rock has been faithfully