Marriage--Temporary or Permanent?

AMERICA is rapidly becoming a land of Mormons. The law forbids continuous polygamy, but we are substituting for it consecutive polygamy. To draft a figure of speech from days of horse-drawn vehicles, we do not drive in matrimonial pairs, but driving tandem is an increasingly popular custom.

For the most part, the Christian churches of America have been doing very little until recently to stem the tide of divorce which has made this country a disgrace to civilization. With the exception of the Roman Catholic and the Episcopal Churches, remarriage of the divorced has too often and too easily received the blessing of the Church as well as the sanction of society. But at last the leaders of organized Christianity have begun a movement to check the evil, and many religious denominations and other associations have banded together to secure a uniform Federal law bringing into line those states which are lax in their marriage laws, while allowing individual commonwealths to raise the bars against divorce still higher than the national standard, if they so desire.

In this movement for the correction of an evil scandalous in its proportions, it is not competent, of course, to lay emphasis wholly on the law of Christ. Christian morality is necessarily higher than state morality; its compelling power comes through voluntary acceptance of the higher law; it must not depend for obedience upon the power of civil authority. While faithful Christian teaching may do much to quicken the conscience of the nation, its authority and influence are necessarily limited when dealing with conditions which arise in a society for which the word of Christ is not ‘the last word.’ The State’s appeal must be based upon the conception of marriage as a social institution, not simply as a Church sacrament or ordinance.

It is the purpose of this article to show, briefly, the seriousness of the present situation and then to suggest that permanence in the marriage relation is the law of nature as well as the law of grace.

I

First, the seriousness of modern conditions in America. In spite of iteration and reiteration, the alarming increase in divorce has not yet been brought home to the conscience of the nation. It was not until 1876 that we had any authoritative information in regard to divorce in the United States. In that year the official reports of the Bureau of the Census showed 122,121 divorces for the ten preceding years. Subsequent reports show an increase for each decade alarming in its rapidity. In 1886 the divorces for ten years were 206,595; the next decade showed 352,363; the next 593,362; the decade ending in 1916 showed 975,728 — a total of over two and one quarter millions of divorces in a half-century, with four and one half millions of divorced persons, and nearly 1,700,000 minor children left fatherless or motherless as a result of the law’s laxity.

And the figures are still mounting tragically. The latest census report shows an increase of divorce in one year of more than 11 per cent over the previous year. In 1922 the proportion of divorces to population was 136 for every 100,000 of population, as against 112 six years before. There were two divorces for every fifteen marriages — the exact figures in 1922 being one divorce to every 7.6 marriages. The increase is indicated more clearly when we learn that just five times as many divorces in proportion to population were granted in 1922 as were granted in 1870. In Canada, among a people very similar to our own, there were in 1916 only 57 divorces, as against 112,036 in the United States; that is, in proportion to population we had 120 divorces granted as against one in Canada.

The record in some states is nothing less than appalling. Nevada reached the lowest depths, granting 1000 divorces — to many people, of course, having only temporary residence — as against 900 marriages. In 1922 this record of Nevada — ten divorces to nine marriages — had some close followers: Oregon, one to 2.6; Wyoming, one to 3.9; Montana, one to 4.3; Arizona, one to 4.7; Oklahoma, one to 4.8; Idaho, one to 4.9; Ohio, one to 5.2; Nebraska and Indiana, one to 5.4; Kansas, one to 5.7; Michigan, one to 5.8.

Lest it should be supposed that westward the course of divorce takes its way, we note that Texas has a record of one divorce in less than four marriages, Maine one in less than six, Florida one in less than seven, and Rhode Island one in less than eight. In the nation the record for 1922 was 165,139 divorces, with freedom of remarriage to 330,278 persons.

To permit the marriage relationship to assume such an experimental character involves results even more serious than the broken vow. Civil law has set up the machinery for unmarrying a wife from a husband and a husband from a wife; but that machinery cannot in fact be successful until it also succeeds in unfathering or unmothering the child who is the fruit of the union so dissolved. For the child to remain neither unfathered nor unmothered, after the husband has been unwifed and the wife unhusbanded, is indeed a glaring contempt of court! Yet it is the sort of contempt the courts have not succeeded in avoiding. After the arguments for divorce have all been presented, the presence of one child effectively confutes them. The child not only presupposes the family; it. compels the family. It is the outward and visible sign of an actual relationship between the father and the mother. The State may conceivably repeal the Christian marriage law; it cannot repeal the child.

From the point of view of social and legal complications, the diversity of state laws presents a ghastly situation. Fifty-two causes for divorce are listed, not counting those for which an annulment of marriage may be secured. In twenty-seven states there is no provision for a divorce a mensa et thoro— that is, a legal separation without annulment of the bond. Such a separation has always been recognized ecclesiastically as a lawful and sometimes a necessary remedy for marriage difficulties, but in these states such relief can be had only by a divorce a vinculo with remarriage allowed, and indeed, to all intent, encouraged. One of the judges of the Supreme Court of New York State recently put the matter clearly when he said: ‘The finality of divorce is hideous. Separation holds the possibility of reconciliation. Divorce precludes it.’ In the same statement he protested against the evils of alimony as a contributing cause in provoking divorce proceedings: ‘Alimony represents the sanction of divorce by the law and society; it places a premium on selfishness, slothfulness, idleness, and immorality.’

The legal complications of divergent state laws add property confusion and personal entanglements to this social evil. Although, under the Federal Constitution, full faith and credit must be given in each state to the judicial proceedings of every other state, requirements concerning residence, legal notices, and other matters may differ in different states, with the result that actually marriages are not legal in one place although so considered elsewhere, children have been adjudged illegitimate in one state though legitimate in another, a man or woman may be convicted of bigamy in a neighboring state after a divorce and remarriage across the border. Even the Supreme Court of the United States has not always been able to disentangle the complicated problems arising out of inheritance.

Of course, in so brief a discussion of the subject it is impossible to deal with many of the diversities of state laws through which these complications arise. An entire chapter would be needed, for example, merely to enumerate the varieties of legislation as to the age at which a valid marriage contract may be made. In six states a girl of twelve may marry, with the parents’ consent; in one state she may do so without such consent. Small wonder that the author of The Social Control of the Domestic Relations should say: ‘It may reasonably be doubted whether any people in Occidental civilization has marriage laws so defective as ours. Almost every conceivable blunder has been committed.’ Other questions upon which legislators spend much labor are of little consequence compared with the vital question of the preservation of the home as the unit of our social life.

II

Conditions moral and legal have now reached such a pass that not only have churches and welfare organizations united in an effort to secure Federal legislation and a uniform divorce law as a minimum of local permission to annul marriage, but the American Bar Association has joined in the demand. At best this regulation will but partially solve our problem. Three things are needed in addition. First, we need a clear statement of the law of Christ and a rallying of the Christian churches of America to a courageous determination not to countenance any departure from it. This will mean turning over to the civil officials all marriages contrary to Christ’s law. Second, there will be necessary, as a part of the uniform law now demanded, certain safeguards against hasty marriage; and, with this, faithful instruction by Christian pastors as to the seriousness of marriage, in the effort to check hasty alliances. Third, for those who do not accept the law of Christ as final, or for those who accept it as a spiritual ideal rather t han a specific commandment, we need fuller consideration of the social value of permanency in the marriage bond as a prerequisite to any degree of domestic happiness or contentment.

The law of Christ is plain: ‘Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her: and if she herself shall put away her husband, and marry another, she committeth adultery.’ There can be but two questions as to the teaching.

1. Is it the law of Christian marriage or the ideal of Christian marriage? It is only on the assumption that Christ was not legislating, but was pleading for the highest and the best, that any Christian could possibly minimize the teaching. Certainly those who accept His teaching as having divine authority cannot possibly evade the issue, though others, who regard Him only as a great teacher, may perhaps consent to the alteration of His precepts to meet new situations in a new age.

2. The other question deals with an apparent exception or allowance in the report of the words of Christ elsewhere, where the record is: ‘Every one that putteth away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, maketh her an adulteress.’ It is the uncertainty of interpretation here which has led the Episcopal Church to allow, under very stringent conditions, remarriage of the innocent party in a divorce for adultery. Even that exception is further safeguarded by the provision that a clergyman may always decline to solemnize a marriage — a proviso which permits those to decline to officiate under the canon who believe that the exception is grammatically applicable only to ‘putting away’ and cannot be applied to the remarriage. The Roman Catholic Church allows no exception; though, as a matter of fact, in its interpretation of what are known as ‘the Pauline injunctions’ (covering the marriage of unbaptized persons) its actual practice is not beyond criticism. Other Christian churches have more lenient standards. There is not time or occasion here to explain them; suffice it to say that in many parts of the country the ministers are not much, if at all, in advance of the social and ethical standards of the community and are quite ready to marry anyone whom the State permits them to join together — and even where some have scruples there are ‘marrying parsons’ galore, if the contracting parties desire more than a civil ceremony.

We need, therefore, full and courageous presentation of the Christian ideal of marriage; nothing else can so effectively stay the tide of consecutive polygamy. The real reason for laxity of manners and morals is the failure of the churches to teach consistently and continuously the facts of Christianity and the morality of Christianity. The ignorance of multitudes as to the simplest outlines of Christian truth is amazing. Preaching has become ‘arid liberalism’ for the cultured in the more educated sections and ‘acrid literalism ’ elsewhere. The result is that those inside many churches know little of the Christian story and less about Christ’s moral demands, whereas others have been driven away from the Church entirely; the latter, once they cease to live on the inherited religious precepts of a past generation, lapse into a modified paganism.

III

Christian teaching will but slowly reach the mass of the American people. Many of them, we have just said, are merely nominal Christians. Most of them do not hear the teaching, since they are not regular churchgoers. An increasingly large number of them are not disposed to accept the teaching of Christ as final. The present generation, at least, has so slight an attachment to organized Christianity that it will demand something more than the authority of the Christian Church before accepting so ‘hard’ a law of life. ‘What is the good of trying to keep two people together,’ they ask, ‘if these people are wholly unsuited to each other? Could anything be more repulsive and repugnant to sound morality than for those who have lost all the love that justifies a marriage union to attempt to live together in the marriage relation? Is it not better to dissolve the union? And since to permit no remarriage means the denial of another chance for a happy life, why refuse them the opportunity of forming another alliance?’

All this sounds plausible. Even those who wish to be loyal to the ideal of marriage are tempted to utter like sentiments in moments of sympathy with the matrimonial misalliances of their own friends. The special case is always a ‘special’ case. It is exceptional because it is a case near at hand. It is on that account considered in a spirit of sentimental kindliness. The unfortunate domestic disruption is a tragedy, and there is the disposition to view the whole matter leniently. Sympathy lets the heart run away with the head.

It is well, therefore, to insist that the marriage ideal is based upon considerations which have equal weight whether marriage be regarded as a sacrament of religion or as a natural ordinance. This is the special thought which needs to be expressed if we would really influence those who will not ‘hear the Church.’

The fact is that no marriage entered into with even the suggestion of a possible later separation has a fair chance for its life. Happy marriages do not spring into being at a stroke: they are made—made by slow steps and with much patient effort. A passionate emotional attachment will not so overcome the natural selfishness of two individuals as to make them at once considerate and forbearing and set them in the way of permanent happiness. In short, it is not true that some natural law of love can bring about a delightful situation through which a willful, pleasure-loving young woman and an equally indulgent, pleasureloving young man will, simply because of their fascination for each other, immediately exhibit all the virtues necessary for the accommodation of differences of taste and clashing interests and desires, of selfishness set against selfishness.

There are marriages, of course, that proceed smoothly from romantic love to harmonious married affection, untroubled by any serious ripple of discord; but their success cannot be attributed to the supposed fact that mutual affection has made the way miraculously easy. It only looks easy because of the earnest purpose of both parties to make the marriage a happy one. A component part of romantic love is newness, strangeness, delightful surprise; it embarks on voyages of discovery. From its very nature, therefore, romance cannot last. It changes as it grows into something permanent. Me enjoy a new house because it is new. Presently the new becomes familiar, and, for those who are living happily in it, in place of novelty come pleasant memories, comfort, satisfaction. The house is then much finer than a new house; it is a home. In the same way a happy marriage is one which passes from the transitory delights of courtship and the honeymoon and becomes a permanent and satisfactory relation, strong enough to weather the storms of life. Lives fit together through bearing and forbearing; husband and wife make mutual concessions; they give way in small things for the sake of the one great thing. Two lives thus fitted together have tenderer relations than any sentimental, romantic, or passionate pair of lovers ever yet found possible.

All this is somewhat platitudinous. But it paves the way for the statement of a fact which, after such considerations, seems self-evident; namely, that this ideal of marriage can be realized only when marriage is undertaken with no thought of a possibility of its termination. Apart from the repulsiveness of entering upon so intimate a relationship as a mere passing episode, the very suggestion of a possible termination through divorce, with permission for a new trial, is fatal to the first trial. Marriage begun under such terms could not really be tried. It would be condemned to death before ever the trial began. The first moment of boredom or irritation would be a step toward ending it.

Chesterton puts the argument so well that his words bear repeating: ‘In everything worth having there is a point of pain or tedium that must be passed, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon.’ Or again: ‘In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead. . . . That alone would justify the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault, or at least an ignominy.’ And once more: ‘I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant where incompatibility becomes unquestionable. If Americans can be divorced for “incompatibility of temper,” I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced!’

To sum it all up: The real romance of marriage is that it is the great adventure, where two people think so much of each other that they bravely join their lives together and voyage in search of the Happy Isles, considering the promise of delight so great that they are willing to stake their all upon it. Take away the thought of finality and determination from the marriage vow, and at once its romance and beauty are gone, as well as its spirituality.

All this is true of marriage as a natural ordinance. Of course the case is strengthened when marriage becomes sacramental, as in the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches. We must remember, however, that when Jesus Christ enunciated His doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage He was speaking of marriage as it then was, and as of its nature it ought to be, and apart from any new revelation. The permanency of the marriage relation is not simply a matter of ecclesiastical order; the law is a law of human nature. The facts of life themselves show that if the institution of marriage is to result in happiness it must be entered into seriously and with the deliberate intention of entering upon it as a lifelong relationship. Sentimental pleas for exceptional cases are made in forgetfulness of this fact. Stricter divorce laws are necessary, whether the marriage be of nature or of grace, if marriage is to build up a permanent structure. The hardships worked here and there by strict laws of divorce are nothing to the wholesale destruction of home life that would follow if easy divorce should continue and be generally encouraged.

There will, of course, be difficulties in any married life. They are to be expected; and they are to be met, not by permitting all who will to run away from them, but by insisting that all shall face them, and by facing overcome them. ‘One does not put away his mother or his children because of domestic difference; one assumes the relationship to be permanent, and adjusts himself to it as best he can; and in the vast majority of instances the necessity for adjustment promotes permanent affection. It is the same with husband and wife.’ So says Professor Peabody, and he adds: ‘The family thus becomes not a temporary resort for the satisfaction of passion, or a form of restraint from which on the least provocation one may escape, but a school of character where the capacity for ripened affection is trained and amplified by the sense of continuity and permanence.'

This view is the only one that makes marriage possible for nine tenths of the human race. If men and women are allowed to go about looking indefinitely for mates who are easy to live with, there will, in time, be a terrible decrease in permanent marriages. Very few people even remotely approach perfection. The wonderful thing, after all, is not that some marriages turn out badly, but that, men and women being what they are, so many turn out well. Where marriages are undertaken with the idea that they will be put through successfully (rather, that they must be put through successfully), a surprising number of happy homes are built up out of what seems to be most unpromising material. Failures there will always be — tragedies, marriages ending in conditions unendurable. In such cases divorce a mensa et thoru gives all needed relief. But to make tragedies of all the little serio-comic disturbances of married life by lax divorce laws — that is the greatest tragedy of all. Why bother to be considerate, why try to be unselfish, if it is easy to get away from the whole problem? Divorce is easy, goodness is not; why worry about being good if you can more easily be divorced?

IV

The sentiment of America — even its Christian sentiment — cannot be crystallized without continuous teaching as to the seriousness and solemnity of marriage as a permanency. The evil cannot be curbed without legislation making marriage less impermanent. To protect children as well as parents from unhappy married life the facility for undoing the marriage must be checked. To prevent the impatient desire for separation, with a new attempt at a more successful union almost always in the background of thought, we need the teaching that marriage may not easily be annulled, and therefore ought not ‘by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.’ The present impermanency of marriage is resulting in hasty marriages by the thousands. Young men and women, after the briefest possible acquaintance, rush off to a parson or a justice of the peace and then on a week-end honeymoon. They come back, only to discover that they know little of each other and less of their often obtrusively present ‘in-laws’; that the problem of support is pressing if the girl is to give up a business position she held before the nine days’ wonder of her ‘romance ’; that if she does go back to her business office she becomes less and less a wife and seldom a mother; that neither she nor her husband has the slightest idea of marriage as a life of give-and-take — the result being a brief period of bored regret and then a sudden convulsion that ends in separation. This description of marriage among the youth of one class of society may with a few strokes of the brush be changed into a like picture of matrimony among the industrial class, and with a very considerable splashing of color the picture may again be altered to depict the marriage of the idle, vacuous, or vicious rich.

The main sources of domestic instability are moral. As Dr. Peabody says, ‘Its chief provocations are not external, but internal; and its cure must begin with a finer social morality and a more worthy conception of the ends of human life. The problem of the family is but one aspect of the whole drift of social standards and ideals in modem life; and the loosening of the marriage tie is, from this point of view, a premonition of a general landslide of social morality.’

What is the real difficulty with the present generation ? We accomplish nothing by adopting a censorious attitude toward youth, always condemning and always complaining. Manners are bound to vary with varying social conventions; different times bring different behavior. But who shall say that the youth of to-day is less sound at the core than the youth of other days, when much was concealed under a superficial decorum, deference, courtesy, and conventional respect? The trouble lies no more with the young than with their elders. And the trouble with both is that we are morally drifting. Modern life seems to be without purpose or plan. Its chief characteristic is its aimlessness and amazing emptiness. Because we have forgotten some of the old values of life, and have lost our moral bearings, domestic life shares in the undisciplined, unsocialized, self-indulgent, willful, and selfish spirit of the age. The only remedy is to make marriage so serious a thing that it will be seen to demand the generous instincts of mutual discipline, mutual forbearance, and the sharing of mutual burdens. ‘The family was not designed to make life easier, but to make life better.’ To marry without thought of such adjustments of possible friction, with no intention to make sacrifices or to exercise discipline, is bound to result in disaster.

We need steady and persistent teaching, not in the spirit of complaint, but with the winsomeness, patience, and attractiveness of true Christian sympathy and understanding, to correct the debasement of the popular mind which views the whole question of marriage with frivolous unconcern, a form of hilarious emotional experience which would seem to ‘recall the gayety of the gravedigger in a city swept by a pestilence.’ If, in order to make marriage a solemn undertaking, it must of necessity be permanent as a law of nature as well as of grace, then we must strive to improve the laws in the direction of that ideal, even though sometimes the few must suffer for the sake of the many. If the ‘complex agony of unhappy married life’ becomes unbearable, separation without permission to remarry is allowed by the strictest Christian moralist. If circumstances make even separation impossible, ‘special cases of social disease must not, according to the teaching of Jesus, be permitted to menace the general social health.’ These are the words of one who is a member of one of the Liberal Protestant churches, not a Catholic. The language of Felix Adler, because he is arguing on grounds purely ethical and social, is even stronger: ‘It is very hard sometimes to bear the burden of this law [of the permanency of marriage]. If I were a praying parson, I should pray for sympathy not to become unfeeling to the complex, secret agony herein involved. But the law is inexorable.’