WHY EARLY MARRIAGES ARE HAPPIEST

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 98, 20 January 1920, Page 7

WHY EARLY MARRIAGES ARE HAPPIEST

Dr. Ilensley Henson, the new Bishop of Hereford, w not a prelate who minces his words, The bishop is a strong advocate, of- early marriages, and attributes many of the" darkest loaturcs of modern society to tho undue postponement of marriage. The subject of marriage, ho says, goes to tho roots of morality, and carries thfl principal burden of human fate. The sexual relation shows man'-"at-his worst and at his best, '

The sexual passion can drag him into the mire of swinish .sensuality; it can. place him on an ascending path which shall lead him to the heists of a sublimo self-forgetf illness. In every civilised community the State, whilst leaving men and women free to contract marriago at their own discretion, has set limits to their freedom, and has surrounded the solemn contract of marriage, when once enacted, with elaborate and stringent legal securities. It is difficult, too, ho says, to overstate the value of tho emphasis which the Christian religion places" on the- comradeship of man and woman in marriage. Tho other aspects, he declares—the propagation of the race, the duo upbringing of children, the satisfaction of a natural appetite—are not belittled, but lieforo them all is set the supreme function of marriago as perfecting human nature. Because' companionship was necessary for tho full development of man's nature, marriage was instituted to provide him with tho closest and most intimate form of companionship. No considering and informed student of modern society can doubt that ninny of its darkest features are directly traceaide to the undue postponement of marriage. Sometimes for ihe least selfish reasons, sometimes for the most, men delay marriage until the natural mating lime has long passed. Tho transfiguring grace of sentiment and romance with which youth invests the sexual relation is absent, and marriage sinks into a demurely respectable convention, which is but a poor version of what it was meant to lie. Dr. Henson regrets the difficulties concerning housing accommodation, which should bo in the forefront -of social reform. Until that problem _ has been soived, ho says, home life in any real sense cannot grow, and while there is no home life Iho efforts of flio clergy, the school masters and the politicians are mainly futile, Tho bishop regrets that the circumstances and the limes are unfavourable to purity. The terrible, destruction of male life during tho war has emphasised, the disparity of the foxes. All the difficult questions which go to constitute what is called the problem of populatxm have received sinister emphasis from the war. Everything points-to the near approach of a general, deliberate, formulated and sustained attack on the Christian conception of marriage, and the substitution for it. of another conception, which draws its origin, not from alwve, but from below, and finds its historic expression in the. paganism of the ancieitt. world and in the de-Christianised section of modern.