HEAVEN-MADE MARRIAGES.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4559, 30 October 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

HEAVEN-MADE MARRIAGES.

(From the Queen.)

“ Marriages are made in heaven,” says the old proverb. “ Well, if so,” remarks a crusty friend of ours, who' has had no experience of connubial bliss, “ they are awfully marred in coming down.” Now we take it as a rule that any one who scoffs at married life shows a want of soundness in either head or heart. . . •

But after all, our friend, though he thinks with Saint—a fine judge he must have been,' forsooth! —Erancis of Sales, that marriage is a ceaseless mortification, does not impugn Providence for this, but lays the fault upon its earthward transit. In this, then, he is better than they who adopt the irreverent old saying which tells those who have entered into matrimony, “If marriages are made in heaven, you had but few friends there.” Certainly, when we look at the dark side of wedlock, and-note what vile motives are frequently at work to bring it about, and the miseries which often result from it, we might justifiably come to the conclusion that a diabolical, not a heavenly agent, had been at work. Even common opinion, as expressed in proverbs, does not allow that_ every nuptial knot is first tied above ; for it has declared that the marriage of a young woman and a young man is of God's making ; of an old man with a young woman of, Our Lady’s making—as Mary with Joseph; but of an old woman with a young man is made by the author of evil.” - Hence William of Worcester, recording that young Woodville, brother of Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., wedded the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk at the ripe age of ninety, waxes indignant, and calls it a diabolical marriage. And who can say he was not right ? , , Perhaps it was with the pious intent ot thwarting the devil that the law was passed in Genova that no woman under forty was to marry a man more then ten ■ years younger than herself; and that she who was past forty was not to take to herself a husband who was five years younger than herself. Nor would these Genevese permit even Our Lady to have it all her own way, for no man who had reached the mature age of sixty was allowed to marry any woman who was not at least half as old as himself. Wo wonder whether these aws proved effectual. By-the-bye. Our Lady must have been very active in the case of Captain Cooke, since he, at the christening of an infant, to whom he stood godfather, made up his mind to marry her in due time, and fulfilled his intention ; and also in that of Coke, the agriculturist, afterwards Earl of Leicester, who, when seventy years old, married his god-daughter, Lady AnneKeppel, aged twenty, the mother of the present carl. We wonder to what unearthly power gallows marriages were due : for “ in England it hath been the use that if a woman will beg a condemned person, she must come in her smock only, and a white rod in horhand, tod be married beneath the gallows,”

Theinfluence, whatever it was, lieav enly, earthly, or devilish, must have been very strong 1 to make any woman undergo such degradation to win a husband. Yet that it operated upon some we learn, for instance, from. “ The Narrative of Oulandah Egmana, the African, which tells us that in the year 1784, at New York, w a malefactor was to be executed if he did not get a woman to come forward to marry him in her shift, and, as the woman came under the gallows and did this, he was saved. And it is recorded that nine young women in white, with wands in their hands, presented a petition to George I. on behalf of a young man condemned at Kingston, and one promised to marry him under the gallows if reprieved. ‘What success attended them we do not know ; but the good intention of damsels willing to snatch husbands from the jaws of death was riot always appreciated, for a certain Picard about to be strung up, seeing a cripple hurrying to claim him, cried out in great horror, “ She limps, she limps! haste you, and dispatch me quickly.” . . . Although it certainly has been a prevalent idea in Christendom that marriages are made in Heaven, yet when the Church was predominant she decreed that it was not proper that they should be made on earth at all seasons. Thus, in England, the Council of Eanham, in the reign of Ethelred 11, (1008), placed their celebration on a footing with ordeals and oaths, and forbade them at certain times, as tersely stated in an old rhyme found in a parish register of Everton, Notts:— Advent marriage doth, deny. But Hilary gives the liberty; Septuageslma says thee nay, * Eight days from Easter says you may; Rogation bids thee to contain. But Trinity set? thee free again.