MARRIAGE SERVICES.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 244, 3 February 1875, Page 3

MARRIAGE SERVICES.

It is a little singular to reflect upon, that there should not be in existence a fully appropriate marriage service for the uses of either the Church or the world. The Episcopal service, one most hallowed by churchly associations and most full of excellencies, has yet egregious faults. Bad taste, bad grammar, and perjury may have their places, but a marriage service would not seem to be the place for them. “ I take thee to my wedded wife (or husband) —to have and to hold,” is an awkwardness for which only long inculcated reverence could £__! so much rhetorical respect as not to mar a matrimonial ecstasy. “ Till death us do pai t,” is a dislocation in which the most devout churchwoman must feel a pang. The inquiry, “ Who giveth this woman to be married to this man ?” is, to say the least of it, an anachronism. “ I pronounce you man and wife,” flavours somewhat of the tenement-house patois, as of a couple henceforth to say, “My man is abroad to-day,” or, “My woman is getting dinner.” “ With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” is a fiction so stupendous as to be more amusing than impressive. “ Do you promise to obey and serve him ?” The woman shall say, “ I will.” Herein we have the spectacle of a priest at the altar offering the most solemn and binding vow to a woman who has not the least intention of keeping it; who will not keep it, if she has ; and who ought not to keep it, whether she has or not. The Church service was written in a bye-gone age, for a bye-gone type of society. Ils real beauties cannot save it intact to the future. The marriage to be will demand a pledge for which this is neither speech nor language.