me catastrophe. A low
estimate of marriage means contempt of woman; the contempt of woman
means her degradation from her position at the side of man as his
counsellor and his friend to that of his plaything, the instrument of
his pleasure; that again means the enthronement of licence and
licentiousness; that, the softening of the brain power of the manhood
of the race, leading to degeneracy, imbecility, and ultimate
extinction. We need no ecclesiastical organisation to tell us these
things, nor threaten us with direst penalties here or hereafter. These
are the penalties of nature's own aboriginal enactment. As it was in
the beginning, so it is now, and so it shall be unto all time. No
wonder St. Paul called marriage "a great mystery"!

Now, though it be true that Nature's ideal is that which we call
monogamy, it may be perfectly true that we have not yet reached that
level of morality which makes that condition universally practicable.
That wisest of teachers, Jesus of Nazara, expressly recognised this
distinction when he told the Jews of his own day that their lack of
ethical enthusiasm, "their hardness of heart," as he accurately
expressed it, the emptiness of their souls of everything save narrow
nationalism and religious formalism--an emptiness by no means peculiar
to them--was the sole reason which justified a departure from Nature's
great ideal. "In the beginning it was not so," he declared, but "Moses
gave ye permission to write out a bill of divorce". That one exception
may be necessary still, but, let it be understood, it is not the ideal,
and every one knows it, faithful and faithless alike, they whose honour
is intact and they whose souls are smirched. It is an instinct in the
human heart--no one can deny it--that love is for evermore.
Shakespeare is right, "Marriage is a world-without-end bargain," for
love is felt to be eternal. The old Roman digest interprets nature
with philosophic accuracy when it describes marriage as "_Conjunctio
maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani juris
communicatio_". "The union of man and woman and the companionship of
all life, the sharing of right, human and divine." That is the
majestic conception of matrimony as it took shape in the brain of those
Roman masters of jurisprudence to whom we owe the law which is the
nerve of civilisation. They learnt it from that ethical religion which
we, too, reverently follow, from that morality which they fo