they had one or two, and they
would have no more, and for this purpose criminally thwarted the
purposes of nature. Then comes death and snatches away their solitary
consolation: and they spend their old age childless and loveless, in
mutual upbraidings and unavailing regrets.

How different is the lot of those aged couples--and they were many of
yore, and are yet in various nations--who are like patriarchs amid their
crowds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, dwelling
in mutual love and as if in a moral paradise where all domestic virtues
bloom!

VIII. True, such families are usually the outcome of moderately early
marriages; and many Doctors nowadays disapprove of such unions as an
evil. A moral evil they certainly are not; and the physical evils
sometimes attending them must, I think, be traceable to a variety of
causes; for such evils are certainly not inseparable from early
marriages. As to their moral advantages, Mr. Wm. E. H. Lecky, in his
"History of European Morals," writes of the Irish people in particular:
"The nearly universal custom of early marriages among the Irish
peasantry has alone rendered possible that high standard of female
chastity, that intense and jealous sensitiveness respecting female
honor, for which, among many failings and some vices, the Irish race
have long been pre-eminent in Europe" (v. i. p. 146). And that he does
not confine his statement to female chastity is evident from what he
adds farther on: "There is no fact in Irish history more singular than
the complete and, I believe, unparalleled absence among the Irish
priesthood of those moral scandals which in every Continental country
occasionally prove the danger of vows of celibacy. The unsuspected
purity of the Irish priesthood in this respect is the more remarkable,
because, the government of the country being Protestant, there is no
special inquisitorial legislation to insure it, because of the almost
unbounded influence of the clergy over their parishioners, and also
because, if any just cause of suspicion existed, in the fierce
sectarianism of Irish public opinion it would assuredly be magnified.
Considerations of climate are quite inadequate to explain this fact; but
the chief cause is, I think, sufficiently obvious. The habit of marrying
at the first development of the passions has produced among the Irish
peasantry, from whom the priests for the most part spring, an extremely
strong feeling of the iniquity