rls
continue to be brought up with the preposterous notion that marriage is
the one profession open to them, and that therefore they are by no
means to risk the loss of an "engagement," no matter who the employer
may be, and that the wealthier he is the more suitable he is to be
adjudged, then let us abandon all attempts at reaching our ideal. But
let us at the same time prepare for the overthrow of the home and the
family; for the destruction of "pure religion breathing household
laws," and of the stately, dignified, domestic life, which has been the
glory of every land where Nature's true ideal has been worthily upheld.

If boys are brought up at school, or taught by the social atmosphere
they breathe on first entering into early manhood, to conceive of
marriage as in no wise nobler or loftier in essence than any of those
_mariages apres la nature_, those ephemeral associations, terminable at
will; that the only difference between them is, that the one is legal
and permanent, the other voluntary and dissoluble, then so long will
the scandals of divorce and the revolt against marriage continue to be
heard. What one complains of is the utter lack of reverence in the
view which is taken of this most solemn of all acts. There is no
idealism in the contract. The thoughtless youth who has grown up in
what one may call the "wild oats" theory is, we suggest, utterly
incapable of appreciating the absolutely inestimable blessings which
wedded love might have brought him. How can he? He has "wasted his
substance, living riotously," and the most precious of all the
treasures he has squandered is that of his idealism. _His wife can
scarcely be to him what she might have been had he come to her as he
expected her to come to him_. "The golden gates are closed," "a glory
has passed from the earth". This is pain enough to make hearts weep,
but it is the operation of that inflexible law of Compensation, that
not all the tears of sorrow, not all the absolutions and sacrificial
atonements of Churches, can undo that past, can make that young man to
be as in the days of his youth, before the experimental "knowledge of
good and evil" touched him.

Our remedy is, therefore, not to destroy the institution of Nature, but
to reform the candidates who undertake to embrace it. An ethical
religion would reprobate the sacrilegious bargains in which bodies are
exchanged for gold, and refuse to accord them the honorific title of
marriage,