A RAMPANT EVIL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 16, 16 April 1903, Page 16

A RAMPANT EVIL

rS'sf*

«. 0 the average man, the humor of ' Punch * ig generally of the leaden-heeled order. But • the London Charivari, 1 none the less, often holds the mirro" up to nature, even where it does not t alight upon a streak of the merry fancy that tickles the groundlings. Some time ago it pictured two little maidens fresh from school. They were in earnest conversation. * I don't want to be married,' said one little demoiselle, ' and 1 don't want to be an old mad.' ' Then,' quoth the other, * get married and be divorced.' r l hat is just it. The prevalent social ideals of the hour are 3ure to leaven the budding mind and to find quaint, and sometimes unconsciously wise or witty, expression upon the babbling lips of childhood. It is bad enough, in all reason, to have the principles of moral decay at work in the grown tree. With us, the dry-rot begins its work in the lack of noble Christian ideals with which the human saplings in our State-school nurseries are permitted to grow up. From Monday morning till Friday afternoon we ding-dong into the youthful brain, directly or indirectly, the idea that * the siller ' is everything, that the be-all and the end-all of life is to ' get on ' — to ' make a pile ' it may be, in the not too distant by-and-by.

Our material national progress is gratifying to a degree. But we have had many a time and oft to point out the absurdity of supposing that the possession of a well-lined fob is everything. Beneath the roseate surface of the wealth of most of the foremost nations there lie evils that are preying upon the very vitals of society. They are, in vary-

ing degrees; gnawing also at our own young and favored countries. We refer in particular to the spread of divorce. Nobody needs to be reminded that the family is the foundation of the State. And the increasing facilities for divorce are fast severing the bonds that hold the family together. Keen observers look with deep uneasiness at the drift of divorce legislation. It was last week made the subject of a grave and warning utterance by the Coadjutor-Archbishop of Sydney. A few years ago the eminent Protestant writer, Professor Goldwin Smith, said of the increasing laxity of the American divorce laws :—: —

' Of all the thunder-clouds, rone is darker or. more charged with ruin than this. The responsibility, so far as it is legislative, rests not only on those legislatures which have perilously relaxed the divorce law, but upon jurists who, carried away by the generous desire of emancipating the wife from the dominion of the husband, have broken up the legal and economical unity of a family. To preserve its integrity, the family needs a headship. The necessity may be unwelcome, but it seems to be the fiat of nature.'

The future of the State, the standard of conjuga morality, the family tie itself, depend virtually upon the incidents of marriage. Among these colonies, New South Wales has, since 1892, attained an evil notoriety for the ' advanced ' character of its legislative tampering with the unity and indissolubility of the marriage bond. In 1898 New Zealand also began — and with woful results — experimenting along the lines of greater laxity.

In New Zealand, the divorces granted in each yea f advanced from 25 in 1893 to 46 in 1899. In that year the late Queen gave her assent to the Divorce Bill of 1898. In the following year (1900) the number of divorces granted soared ab once to 85. Later returns are not before us, but they will, doubtless, merely serve as a further evidence in support of the common experience, that divorce increases in proportion to the facilities with which ifc is granted. In the United States some 75,000 husbands and wives are annually put asunder by courts. There, as in these countries, divorces are, of course, almost entirely limited to the nonCatholic population. It is difficult to realise the world of domestic unhappiness, the ruin of home-life, the disintegration of families, that those fearful figures imply. 'The nation,' said Cardinal Gibbons in a recent memorable utterance, 'ia sick, and the malady is all the more dangerous because the patient is unconscious of the disease. There is n social scourge more blighting and destructive of family life than Mormonism. It is fearfully increasing the number of divorce-mil's throughout the United States. These mills, like the mills of the gods, are surely but slowly grinding the domestic altars of the nation, and, as if the different States of the Union were not sufficiently accommodating in this respect, South Dakota has the unenviable distinction of granting divorce for the mere asking of it, on the sole condition of a brief sojourn within her borders.' ' Tandem polygamy ' is the name aptly given to the re-marriage of divorcees.

The fact is, we arc plainly verging back, in divorce legislation, to pagan principles. The so-called ' right ' of divorce was practically unlimited in pagan Borne. Men of even the type of Maecenas continually changed their wives. Women displayed almost equal alacrity in repudiating their husbands. '1 he Catholic Church taught, aud teaches, the unity, the sacramental character of marriage, and its indissolubility except by death. The Christian world knew no divorce till the great religions revolution of the sixteenth century. I uxity of ideas regarding the unity and permanency of the marriage bond came with the Reformation. Luther permitted PHiLir of Hesse to have two wives at the same time. And the English Reformation had its origin in the Pope's stern refusal to permit Henry VIII. to exchange a faithful but faded consort of for ty three for the fresh charms of beauty still in its teens. There is, happily, a healthy minority in the Anglican and American Episcopalian Churches who hold " firmly, with Catholics, the inviolability of the marriage bond. But of the hulk of the Protestant denominations it must be said, with regret, that they are apparently satisfied to accept the woful condition of things imposed by secularist legislators, with, perhaps, at best, an occasional word of mild and unrepresentative

disapproval Writing on this identical theme in the Boston S. B. Review,' Dr. Starbuok, a learned Protestant divine, says : * I do not mean, for I do not believe, that Protestantism, as a whole, inclines to simultaneous polygamy, lo the successive polygamy of indeterminate and indeterminable divorce, it is only too sadly plain that it does incline. Nor, as we see, has it been able, in any age, to give an authoritative and controlling voice against simultaneous polygamy.' The existing legalised system of divorce with re-marriage— to use the late Mr. GlaJdstonb's woids— destroys the integrity of the family 'root and branch. A remedy will be in distant sight when the nonCatholic creeds shal have purged the pagan leaven out of their teaching on the nature of the marriage bond. The ultimate remedy must ever be in a return to the old and well-tried Catholic principles. 'The Roman Catholic Church, said the Protestant Bishop Burgess, of Long Island, in a recent discourse, 'has stood like a bulwark against divorce. It has stood for the inviolability of the marriage tie and the unity of the home. Because of that, it is in the world to-day one of the greatest forces for the progress of Christianity.'