no other religion ever approached
it in intimacy with the human heart in all its emotions and in all its
strivings, whether for good or evil.

Rome declares against all breach of the marriage tie. The Church, with
a spirit of concession it knows how to carry through all its dealings,
modifies, softens, assuages, but never severs conjugalism. It makes
the tie occasionally a slip-knot, but it never cuts the string, and I
strongly suspect that it is wise in its legislation.

For a great many years we gave the policy that amount of imitation we
are wont to accord to Romanist practices; that is, we follow them in
part--we adopt the coat, but, to show that we are not mere imitators,
we cut off one of the skirts; and if we do not make the garment more
graceful, we at least consult our dignity, and that is something. We
made divorce the privilege of men rich enough to come to Parliament for
relief; we did with the question what some one proposed we should do
with poisons--make them so costly that only wealthy men should be able
to afford the luxury of suicide. So long as men believed that divorce
was immoral, I don't think any one complained that it should be limited
to persons in affluence. We are a lord-loving race, we English, and are
quite ready to concede that our superiors should have more vices than
ourselves, just as they have more horses and more pheasants; and we
deemed it nothing odd or strange that he, whose right it was to walk
into the House of Peers, should walk out of matrimony when it suited
him.

Who knows?--perhaps we were flattered by the thought that great folk so
far conceded to a vulgar prejudice as to marry at all. Perhaps we hailed
their entrance into conjugalism as we are wont to do their appearance
at a circus or a public garden--a graceful acknowledgment that they
occasionally felt something like ourselves: at all events, we liked
it, and we showed we liked it by the zeal with which we read those
descriptions in newspapers of marriages in high life, and the delight
with which we talked to each other of people we never saw, nor probably
ever should see. It was not too much, therefore, to concede to them this
privilege of escape. It was very condescending of them to come to the
play at all; we had no right to insist that they should sit out the
whole performance.

By degrees, however, what with rich cotton-lords, and cheap
cyclopaedias, and penny trains, and popular lectures, there got up a
sort