way, leaving the parents alone together: a point
at which many worthy couples discover for the first
time that they have long since lost interest in one
another, and have been united only by a common interest
in their children. We may expect, then, that
marriages which are maintained by economic pressure
alone will dissolve when that pressure is removed;
and as all the parties to them will certainly not
accept a celibate life, the law must sanction the
dissolution in order to prevent a recurrence of the
scandal which has moved the Government to appoint the
Commission now sitting to investigate the marriage
question: the scandal, that is, of a great number
matter of the evils of our marriage law, to take
care of the pence and let the pounds take care of
themselves. The crimes and diseases of marriage
will force themselves on public attention by their
own virulence. I mention them here only because
they reveal certain habits of thought and feeling
with regard to marriage of which we must rid ourselves
if we are to act sensibly when we take the necessary
reforms in hand.
First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves
to be bound not only by the truths of the Christian
religion but by the excesses and extravagances which
the Christian movement acquired in its earlier days
as a violent reaction against what it still calls
paganism. By far the most dangerous of these,
because it is a blasphemy against life, and, to put
it in Christian terms, an accusation of indecency
against God, is the notion that sex, with all its
operations, is in itself absolutely an obscene thing,
and that an immaculate conception is a miracle.
So unwholesome an absurdity could only have gained
ground under two conditions: one, a reaction
against a society in which sensual luxury had been
carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that
the world was coming to an end, and that therefore
sex was no longer a necessity. Christianity,
because it began under these conditions, made sexlessness
and Communism the two main practical articles of its
propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original
bias in these directions. In spite of the putting
off of the Second Coming from the lifetime of the
apostles to the millennium, and of the great disappointment
of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of Christians
seriously prepared for the end of the world, the prophet
who announces that the end is at hand is still popular.
Many of the people who ridicule his demonstrations
that the fantastic monsters of the book of Revelation
are among us in the persons of our own political contemporaries,
and who proceed sanely in all their affairs on the
assumption that the world is going to last, really
do believe that there will be a Judgment Day, and
that it might even be in their own time.
A thunderstorm, an eclipse, or any very unusual weather
will make them apprehensive and uncomfortable.
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