FAMILY LIFE.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1707, 26 March 1913, Page 8

FAMILY LIFE.

BISHOP OF HULL AND PAG i\ T MOEAI.ITy; ■

In a Lenten address to business men, at St. Helen's, York, on February 10, Dr. kempthorne, Bishop of Hull, spoke out in. regard to certain decadent tendencies. Family life, he pointed out, was Divine in origin, and the human relationship. of marriage had been transfigured by our Lord, Who taught that tho sex impulse, rightl/ used according to God's law, and linked with the higher eide of our nature, was a good and holy thing.

Rightly used, it might be a holy flamo kindled on God's altar, sanctified in marriage for the foundation of tho home; misused it might bo a conflagration of hell. That was tho distinction between lovo and lust. The Bishop went on to urge the necessity of maintaining tho Christian law of the indissolubility of marriage, and spoke of the demand oxpressed in much modern fiction and iu other quarters for' a new and lax system of morals. The essence of tho new doctrine was to eliminate tho ideal of loyalty from marriage. Once the sexunl passion of either party has died down tho marriage is to bo dissolved. ' Sex filled the whole horizon of the advocates of tho new morality. AH other qualities and impulses of a true marriage were disregarded.

"We Christians," continued the Bishop,' "must declare ware to tho knife against this new theory of sexual morality. Ono thing is abundantly clear: tho day is long past when men could say, 'Leave us Christian, morality, but don't trouble us with Christian dogma and doctrines.' Nowadays it is not Clu-istian doctrines that are called in question; it is tho most elementary Christian morality* that wo have got to fight .for, and depend upon it we shall not fight for it' successfully unless we are armed with strong convictions as to the truth of our faith."

Christian faith and moral?, lio declared, had always hung together, and always will.- Those high-minded but non-Chris-tian citizens who ask for a relaxation of the present marriage laws did not at nil appreciate the forces of corruption in the world through lust. No' one who had worked as a parish pvicst as he had in our big cities could fail to know of tho horrible forces of pollution that exist, and wo did w> have to look very far to trace symptoms of hideous immorality more rampant than ever in our cities anil villages—and to some extent the result of these laxer and virtually pagan ideas of morality. '