concern others besides yourself; it will concern your children; and beyond that, it concerns the world.  You are right when you ask your friends to come and rejoice with you at your wedding.  It is the concern of all the world when people love each other, and it is the failure of love that concerns them when marriage is a failure.  Such failure chills the atmosphere; it shakes our faith in love as the supreme power in the universe; it makes us all waver in our allegiance to constancy and love when love fails.  It is a joyful thing when people love.  “All the world loves a lover.”  It is an old saying, but what a true one!  It is our concern when people nobly and loyally love each other, it is the concern of the community, and those who take upon themselves these public vows seem to me to have a more truly moral conception of love than those who say:  “This is our affair only; it is not the affair of the State or the affair of the Church.”  But the actual ceremony must be the expression of a moral feeling such as that.  It cannot in itself make moral what is immoral!  The old idea that if a woman was seduced by a man she was “made honest” by the man marrying her is essentially immoral.  Very likely all that she knew about the man was that she could not trust him, and to suppose that we can set right what is wrong by tying them together for the rest of their lives is to imagine an absurdity and to establish a lie.

Or take the case from another point of view.  I have two in my mind at this moment, who for some reason (a reason not very far to seek if you read our English marriage laws) came to the conclusion that it is not right to place oneself in such a position as a married woman is in under English law.  I am not discussing whether they were right or wrong; I say that quite sincere and moral people do come to that conclusion sometimes, and so did these two.  They lived together, therefore, without being legally married.  They were absolutely faithful to each other; their love was as responsible, as dignified, as true as any such relation could be.  It lacked to my mind one thing—­the sense of a wider responsibility—­but then it had very much that many legal marriages have not.  Those two people are put outside society; it is made almost impossible for them to earn their living; and at last in despair they go to the registry office, and sign their names in a book.  What difference has been made in their relation to each other?  Absolutely none.  They are no more convinced of the right and duty of the community to be concerned with marriage than they were before.  They have yielded to coercion.  Their moral standard, good or bad, is precisely what it was; their relation to each other wholly unchanged.  But in the eyes of the world they have become respectable, they are “moral,” they can be received back into the bosom of society.  And why?  Because they have gone through a ceremony in which they do not believe!