What God Hath Not Joined

JUNE, 1923

BY JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

I

THE problem of divorce, at all times so perplexing, has become acute in recent years. Tendencies too many to discuss have made it so. The mood and temper of the age, its yeasty unrest, its enfeebled spiritual authority, its shifting moral sanctions, its increasing economic pressure, the larger sphere and new demands of woman, the revolt against the standards of the last generation, with much else added, make the question complex and baffling. Even before the Great War the facts were disquieting enough; and since its close, the riot of divorce has become almost an orgy, aggravated, no doubt, by the erotic legacy which the war left us. In England, where the public mind is more exacting, conditions are said to be worse than with us, until many fear that we are infected with the virus which undermined the ancient societies.

None the less, it is very easy to see the problem out of all proportion, and to become unduly alarmed by it. The glass of modern fiction reflects the facts, but in an exaggerated form, by bringing them to a focus and leaving other facts out of the picture. In a recent popular novel, called Brass, of five marriages studied, only one is endurable. It recalled a similar but much stronger story written some years ago, Double Harness, by Anthony Hope, to read which tempted one to conclude that marriage is what war is declared to be. The story is told with a brilliantly sinister power and acumen of soul-vivisection, in which worldly wisdom is salted with acrid wit, albeit touched, toward the end, with pity; showing what a ghastly thing marriage may be in the hands of fools and self-lovers, in whom a swinish sensuality is joined with an appalling shallowness of soul. Both books are patches of perdition; but no one in his senses thinks of taking either as a picture of married life. Happily, so far at least, in spite of all the ado made about it, divorce, in proportion to marriage, is the rare exception, which puts the rule of the goodness of marriage to the test, and proves it.

How to conserve both the values of the individual and the hard-won inheritance of the race makes the real problem, of which divorce is only one phase. That is, among right-thinking people it is so. As for the pusillanimous set of moral parasites, who pollute what they touch and pervert what they enjoy, a way can be found to deal with them as they deserve. More deadly by far is the subtle and pervasive cynicism in regard to marriage in our day. Much of our later fiction deals with it, not only lightly, but flippantly, and at times sordidly, with seldom a gleam of moral insight or spiritual vision, as if marriage had become a bondage from which to secure release.

So, often, it is, because one or both of the parties to it are held in slavery, not by marriage, but by some dark inner bondage of soul. The non-moral society portrayed in The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edith Wharton, is typical of wide areas of modern life, including the precious pair of dead-beats whose story it tells; but one touch makes us pause.

' The little girl wound her arms about Susy’s neck and leaned against her caressingly.

“‘Are you going to be, soon, then? I’ll promise not to tell if you don’t want me to.”

Going to be divorced? Of course not! What in the world made you think so?”

' “ Because you look so awfully happy,” said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply.’

Such precocious cynicism in the nursery fills one with dismay, in that it poisons the springs of life. Nor is it so rare as some imagine, in an age when the hardships of virtue are an argument for lenity to vice, and the difficulty of duty is a reason for shirking it. Living in an air of indulgence, we are soft, flabby, and morally short of wind. If a thing is disagreeable, we do not do it. Homes are wrecked, social life is undermined, and children are sent adrift, because, forsooth, ‘I was unhappy’; just as in business life statutes are broken and moral principles disregarded, because ‘a man must get ahead.’ Trace almost any of our ills to its source, and its roots will be found in our worship of success, our cult of comfort, our quest of a ‘good time,’ our selfish love of the easy way, which turns out in the end to be a path of flame!

II

No wonder jurists, educators, publicists, and churchmen alike are puzzled, not alone by the spirit and facts of the time, but by a disinclination to face the facts squarely and think the issues through. Even among teachers of the finest moral insight, there is the widest diversity of judgment. At one end is Dr. Felix Adler, who will not allow divorce for any cause whatever, not even for infidelity to the marriage vow; though he will agree to separation, if conditions are intolerable. At the other end is Mr. Louis Post, who holds that anyone who asks for a divorce ought to have it; because such a request shows that real marriage, if it ever existed, is dead and ought to be buried.¹ Between the two extremes, we find a long gamut of opinion, all the way from the sacramentarian to the libertarian, making the solution as much a medley as the problem. Meanwhile, the Church, when it does not actually evade the issue, falls back upon an ancient formula of doubtful exegesis, or else spends its time debating whether the word ‘obey’ should be retained in the marriage rite!

It is indeed strange. At a time when we hear so much about the Social Gospel, no one seems able or willing to show us how a spiritual religion can cleanse, enlighten, and consecrate the relations of the sexes, which are the foundations of the social order. There is sore need of clear thinking and plain speaking on a cluster of questions — sex, marriage, birth-control, divorce — which we dare not much longer ignore. My former colleague at the City Temple, in her series of addresses, Sex and Common Sense, is almost the only one who has dared to deal with such issues. Miss Royden has spoken as the situation demands, frankly and without fear, reverently and with a wise charity. It is in accord with the fitness of things that the greatest woman preacher of our time should render this service, giving the woman point of view in respect of questions on which women have been too long silent. Every page of her book is aglow with human sympathy and spiritual vision, as she seeks the truth in the light of the facts of life and the mind of Jesus.

For, whatever theology we may hold, not one of us but is ill at ease in his mind if he feels that Jesus is on the other side of any question. Nor is his teaching at all obscure, if we remember that He was a light-bringer and not a mere lawgiver. Those who read his words about divorce as literal law ought, in all honesty, to interpret his other teachings in the same manner; for example, his words about selling all our goods and giving to the poor, and his injunction to nonresistance. It is odd to find men so literal on one point and so liberal on others. The spectacle of cruelty or cowardice masquerading in the guise of orthodox exegesis is familiar enough. Plainly, if we really want to know the meaning of any precept of Jesus, we must read it in the context and atmosphere of his teaching as a whole; in the free, sane, exalted light of his mind. Nay, more; we must be ready for daring adventure if we mean to follow his truth and make trial of his way of life.

As on so many other subjects, Jesus left nothing really new to be said about marriage and divorce, if we keep in mind his revolutionary attitude toward woman. To a captious question from his critics, He made reply, lifting the whole subject out of the mire into a higher air, where marriage is a permanent union, and a lustful look is adultery. Neither ascetic nor eugenist, free equally from prudishness and laxity, Jesus saw the fact of sex for what it is. With Him, marriage, like the Sabbath Day, is made for man, not man for marriage. Sex is secondary. Woman, in his thought, is not primarily an instrument of sex, nor even a potential mother. She is not first of all a woman, but a human soul of incomputable value and sanctity, to degrade whom is desecration. Therefore, to ’look upon’ her merely as an object of desire is a degradation of personality and a treason against God. Thus, in a world of putrid impurity, Jesus set forth his ideal of the new social order that He sought to found, in which all the facts of life are holy, and all its fellowships happy. To such a life his disciples are called, and for the man who lives in his truth and follows in his way there is no problem of divorce at all, since the Spirit of Christ forgives even the ultimate infidelity — as He Himself did in the court of the Temple.

What all this means in marriage is made vivid by a story told me in the North of England, of a man whose wife, soon after her marriage, fell into vicious ways, and went from bad to worse. One evening he came home to find, as he had often found before, that she had gone on a new debauch. He knew only too well in what plight she would return, after two or three days of a nameless life. In an empty and cheerless house he sat down to look the fact in the face, the better to learn what he must do. The worst had happened too many times to leave him any hope, and he saw what lay before him. The words of the marriage rite, ‘for better, for worse,’ had now a terrible meaning; but he reaffirmed his vow on his knees. When a friend who knew the facts ventured to commiserate him, he answered, ‘ Not a word! ’ His wife did not mend her ways, but died in his house some years later, a poor wreck sunken in shame, with his hands spread over her in pity and prayer! Such is the Christian way of dealing with a tragic marriage; and before we use the words of Jesus as stones to throw at others, it behooves us to look into our own hearts.

Judged by the real spirit and purpose of Jesus, the attitude of the Church today in respect to marriage is untenable. Few of the marriages ‘solemnized’ in our churches are Christian in any sense, since many of those so married do not even profess Christian faith, much less try to live by it. At best, many are only nominal Christians, and as often as otherwise they have not been instructed as to what Christian marriage means. Yet they receive the blessing of the Church, and, by implication at least, are expected to live by its vows. It is nothing short of absurd. Indeed, it is open to debate whether it is right to impose an ideal, meant to apply only to followers of Christ, as a law upon those who do not take upon themselves the obligations of his faith. In fact, the only honest thing for the Church to do is, either to distinguish between Christian marriage and common marriage, or else to refuse to be a party to any marriage except between those who make avowal of Christian principles; and then to insist that such a union is indissoluble by default of either party. By so doing it will lose in popularity, but it will gain in self-respect; and by being in line with the teaching of Jesus, it may the better hope to do by conversion what it fails to do by coercion. For coercion it is, whether the ideal of Jesus be written into a law, or enforced by social pressure.

III

Now, consider. In the world as it is, — which Keats called ‘a vale of soulmaking,’— where the Kingdom of Heaven often seems like a visionary scene suspended in the sky, there are all kinds of folk, of all grades of mind, character, and condition; refined, vulgar, clever, stupid, and neutral. People marry for their own reasons, or for none that anyone can discover; and many of them are not fit for marriage at all, unworthy of its sanctity and incapable of its high demands. Mistakes.are inevitable. Hasty, ill-considered, foolish marriages are made every day, foredoomed to failure. All kinds are braided together in marriage — the degenerate, the diseased, the abnormal, the criminal, the roué, those of unbalanced minds and tainted blood — many whose union can mean nothing but tragedy, and whose parenthood is a social disaster. In such a world, as he who has eyes must see, divorce, in one form or another, is a necessity, if not a commandment.

Those whom God has joined together are not lightly to be put asunder; but there are those whom God has not joined together. It needs no insight to see that there are cases where to continue the marriage relation is a deeper affront to morality and public order than any divorce could be. There are conditions of degeneracy, of infidelity, of malicious perversion of all that is holy in the marriage vow, killing not only love but respect, and dissolving any real union by automatic process. There are malignities of disposition, outrages against personality, mordant hostilities, and cruelties of behavior far worse in their erosive and blighting destructiveness than any brutality of physical violence, or any deflection from the fidelities of wedlock. Such marriages are a lie, and if we really desire truth and purity, some way must be devised to heal these social cankers. One hesitates to describe the attitude of those who seem to prefer regularity to reality, and are willing to tolerate any horror so long as it is hidden under the smooth surface of society.

Nor is divorce by any means an unmixed evil. So far from being an attack on marriage, it is in fact an attempt to protect its sanctity and preserve its permanence. When allowance is made for every kind of abuse, from which nothing human is exempt, if there are moral reasons against divorce, so there are moral reasons in favor of it. This at least is true: the sanctity of marriage lies in a sacred union of hearts, which the Church may bless and the State make legal, but which neither can create or annul. Where love is, there marriage is; where love is not, marriage has ceased to be. For marriage to go on when love is dead puts before us a situation which, if described for what it is, would require the use of words that cut like whips of fire. If a loveless marriage is chaste just because it is legal, then chastity is a thing of rite and rote, an empty form and not a principle of purity at all. No wonder the late Lord Bryce once said that the morality of a country is not to be measured by the number of divorces, but as often as not the other way round. Its condition may be really worse if its people cynically allow their social life to rest upon anything less noble than the bond of moral love, which alone can make it holy and enduring.

Often enough divorce is silly, sad, nauseating, and in other ways afflictive of the community. Often, too, it may be a greater mistake than marriage, and it carries penalties of its own known only to those who have had to face it. Either way it is a tragedy for the child, who is the most pitiful figure in the plot, whether he is bereft of one parent., or doomed to live in a home where love is only a memory. Instead of being the sybaritic luxury so many people think it is, its victims are in fact sacrifices, more or less involuntary, to the general good. It may have the value of a horrible example, to deter others from rushing into a marriage of fancy, or of worldly station. Its glaring publicity, its hideous revelations — ridiculous when not disgusting — are not things to be invited. At best, divorce is a clinic, a piece of social surgery attempting to salvage the wreck of marriages which are manifestly mistakes, if not tragedies. Anyway it will go on, until we find some better way whereby a marriage may be ended legally, when it has already been ended morally.

IV

To discuss what should be the law of the land in the matter of divorce is beyond my competence. Still, all must agree that in the social control of marriage, as of anything else, law must be an embodiment of the living will of the people, and not merely the stony grip of the dead hand of the past. The South Carolina law, which refuses to allow divorce on any ground, is clearly the expression of a tradition, rather than the voice of to-day; more the sentiment of a proud and conservative past, than a legal aid to the social morality of the present. The ideal of home life in the state is of a high order, but not more so than in other states of the South, where divorce is permitted. Nor does the law seem to apply with equal rigidity to the black folk, among whom marital irregularities are quite common. Even so, it is easily evaded by setting up a legal residence elsewhere, before returning to the state to live. For all these reasons, the law is hardly a case in point; but it does serve to show how the developing moral judgment of a community may be thwarted, if not arrested.

For a better example of the workings of a rigid law— albeit, not so stern, in that it allows divorce for infidelity — we must go to England, as revealed in the Rutherford case recently decided. The man was a brute from the first and all along, ending his career by a foul murder, for which he escaped execution on plea of insanity, which was no doubt justified. Years passed, and the wife sought divorce on grounds of adultery, — proved at the first trial, but later dismissed, — and her petition was accordingly denied. Had the man not been a lunatic, he would have been executed, and the wife would now be free. Because he is insane, she must remain, in law, his wife — tied to a dead body, with no hope of release. Here is a marriage of no value to society, much less to the parties to it, since no one argues that they should live together, even if it were possible. Why should not the woman have her liberty and the right to remarry if she so desires? If it be true that hard cases make bad law, it is equally true that bad law makes hard cases; and an injustice so atrocious ought to move even a staid people to mitigate the severity of a law which is neither just nor merciful.

About all that we need ask of the law is that it set up a safeguard, as much against a rigid cruelty as against the laxity which makes possible the consecutive polygamy so often flaunted in our faces by moral morons. So much is plain; but beyond that the law cannot go very far. My own feeling is that the less detailed the law is, the wiser it will be, provided we institute special courts for the purpose, in which both men and women shall sit as judges, where issues as difficult as they are delicate may be dealt with in a manner worthy of their solemnity. Such courts, it need hardly be added, should have the sanctity and privacy of a confessional; and between the application for a divorce and the granting of it, there should be a pause of time for reconsideration, to guard against rashness and action taken in haste. In the most favorable environment, it is never easy for an outsider to pass on the conditions which make a marriage intolerable. Often a mere trifle may be the last straw on a burden of misery or indignity carried for years, making it unbearable. At any rate, as we dare not be satisfied with the present system, if we cannot devise a better plan, we deserve to live under a menace.

A rather wide pastoral experience, on both sides of the sea, has ripened some thoughts into convictions. For one thing, he will look in vain who hopes to find a simple solution of this sadly tangled problem: it does not exist. Each case of unhappy marriage stands by itself, and must be judged by its own facts, which refuse to fit into any glib formula. For that, reason, a rigid and detailed law as to the grounds of divorce in all cases, without regard to the human equation in each case, works frightful cruelty and injustice. But much can be done without law. In England, during the last year of the war, and the awful year of moral collapse following it, when men were returning to their homes after years of absence, conditions were appalling. My study at the City Temple was a confessional, in which tales were told that made the heart, sick, revealing the weakness of poor human nature, its dark dishonor, its selfish sin. Yet even then, as before and since, often in cases where divorce might have been legally obtained, it was possible, by tact, by moral suasion, by sheer love of young lives astray, to reawaken love, adjust disputes, and save homes from ruin.

After all, divorce is the dark end of the problem; the real remedy lies in making marriage a nobler and finer thing than it is. The whole conception of the relation of the sexes must be lifted to a higher level, and interpreted by moral intelligence and spiritual vision, in the light of human realities and social values. For the moment, a revolt against the prudishness of a former time has swept too far toward a frankness that is not modest, and a liberty hard to know from license. None the less, out of the agitation of our time a clearer insight will emerge, and a finer fellowship in marriage; but not without bitter suffering, much of which might be averted in individual cases by very simple arts. For the most part, it is what workmen call ‘an inside job’; and until we have learned to live with ourselves and keep the peace, we may not hope to live with another without friction.