he faith of the world. They have inclined us to the false belief
that love is not eternal. They have, so far as they could, destroyed
a great ideal, injured a great faith. People--and some of these are my
personal friends, and people for whom I have a very great respect--who
affirm that a legal or religious marriage is not necessary because their
relations to one another are not the concern of the community, may have, it
seems to me, a morality that is lofty, but not one that is broad, not one
that is truly human. It is not true (and, therefore, it is not moral) to
say that marriage is not the concern of other people. No one can fail in
love, no one can take on himself so great a responsibility and fail to
fulfil it, without all of us being concerned. Humanity is _solidaire_.
The community is and must be concerned in the love of men and women in
marriage. But what should be the nature of that concern? What should
we--the community--hold up as the right standard of sex-relationship, and
what methods should we use to impose it on others? I think you will have
gathered from what I have said already that, to my mind, marriage should
be a union that looks forward to being permanent, faithful, monogamous. It
should be the expression of a union of spirit so perfect that the union
of the bodies of those who love follows as a kind of natural necessity. It
should be the sacrament of love, "the outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace." And something of this perfection is to be found in
many marriages that seem (and are) far from complete. I often hear of the
lives of married people where there has been very much to overcome, where
perhaps the marriage has been entered into in ignorance and error; where
the passion that brought the two together has been very evanescent; where
it has soon become evident that their temperaments do not "fit"; where it
might easily be said that they were not really "married" at all: yet
there has been in these two such a stubborn loyalty to responsibilities
undertaken, such a magnificent sense of faithfulness, such a determination
to make the best out of what they have rather lightly undertaken; sometimes
even only on one side, there has been such faith, such honour, such
loyalty, such a refusal to admit a final failure, that a relationship poor
in promise has become beautiful and sacred. In face of such loyalty, the
theory that sex-relationships can rightly be brief, evanescent, thrown