man reported within
this last fortnight as having been arrested the day after his marriage
at a registrar's office, and as having been since then condemned to
penal servitude for life. Is that fact a relief to the woman who was
his victim? Not a bit of it Let her contract a new marriage, and the law
will indict her for bigamy. She must live in loneliness, or be classed
with harlots. Here is a man I know, an outlying parishioner of mine,
whose wife is hopelessly and incurably insane. Is there any release
from the marriage-bond for him? Not a chance of it. There are a hundred
thousand people of this country, men and women, so saturated and
demoralized with drink that only an overwhelming Christian pity could
bear to touch 'em with a barge-pole--husbands intolerable to wives,
wives intolerable to husbands, live corpses with corruption distilling
at each pore--and this filthy marriage law, which is the last relic
of Christianity's worst barbarism, binds quick and wholesome flesh to
stinking death, and bids them fester together in the legal pit. I set
one honest man's curse upon that shameless and abominable creed, and I
would not take my hand away from my seal though I went to the stake for
setting it there.'

He broke into a stormy laugh, and clapped Paul boisterously upon the
shoulder.

'And now,' he said, with a sudden change of voice and manner, 'that we
have got rid of the froth of passion, let me offer you one cup of the
sound wine of reason. Fight this business through, Paul Armstrong. Don't
give way by half a barleycorn. The story, as it tells against you, will
be made known. The truth, as your friends know it, must come out as
well. If I had time to read up for the bar, and pass my examinations,
I would ask nothing better than to be your counsel. Face the music,
Armstrong, and you may help the cause of justice. It is time that this
union of quick and dead were done with, and that the ecclesiastic fetish
rag which makes its wickedness respectable were burned.'

CHAPTER XXIX

There were the usual legal delays, and public interest in the case would
have slumbered had it not been for the newspapers. But a steady-going
England, on whose John Bull qualities of reticence and solidity we have
been prone to pride ourselves, does occasionally betray a quicker and
more curious spirit than it commonly desires to be credited with, and
there is no pole to stir it from its hybernating sleep which reaches
so far and pu