old days!" while yet in the flesh imitated the life of angels, withdrew himself from earthly things, forced nature, which ever inclines downward," which it does not,-" aspiring to things heavenly and placing himself between Heaven and Earth,”— the highest pillar was sixty feet, the lowest seven feet and a half, "he, together with the angels, praised the Lord, lifted up the prayers of men, and offered them to God."

CHAPTER X

SURELY, with all our faults, and notwithstanding our peccabilities of various sorts, for which we always get due credit, there is nothing in our annals relating to social morality, veracity, or faith, that is such a caricature on true religion and undefiled as the citations we have made from the ecclesiastical and secular history of the past, when everybody believed in the sacramental nature of marriage. And we say this notwithstanding the fact that persons among us, mostly because of their not living up to the national standard of marital morality, frequently apply to the courts for release from wedlock. Sometimes it is because of some trifle, as if marriage of all things in the world must be absolutely perfect when there is nothing perfect. They miss alike the disciplining sanctity of living up to the marriage contract and of its entailed obligations in the way of mutual selfdenial, courtesy, affection, concession, and responsibility, and they are not willing to act the manly part of silence and restraint.

Divorce among the people of America is but an exception to the general rule of matrimonial constancy. There is hardly a day that we do not hear of contented couples who, surrounded by self-respecting descendants, are celebrating their "golden weddings,"

having lived fifty years together in wedlock harmony. Yet, as a nation, we have existed but one hundred and thirty-six years. We defy our calumniators to refer us to a half dozen married persons during the 1300 years from St. Jerome, who translated the Bible from Greek into Latin, to Jeremy Taylor, the author of Holy Living and Dying," who lived 50 years in Christian amity, without the occurrence of moral discrepancies to disturb their peace, and who were surrounded with children and grandchildren upon the escutcheon of whose genesis there was no spot.

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In the days of the supremacy of medieval Christianity when, we are told, there was no divorce, the shortest records of marriage almost invariably tell the number of children born in wedlock and also in the refined language of the day, the number of "bastards."

We need not be alarmed. There is no cause for fear concerning the abolition of marriage in America, nor concerning the breaking up and wrecking of the home, as apprehended by pessimistic timidity.

The calamity howled in the public ear either by enmity or feeble belief is but a bugaboo or chimera of the faint-hearted, for "God's in his Heaven." Besides, our wisest people are at work on the solution of the problem, which is more perplexing because many of our alien people and their descendants are not of the same faith nor nationality. If they were even of one coerced faith, as in the long ago, just as we have corrected so many other inheritances we shall in time correct this also. Just as the Salem belief in

witchcraft, a legacy from the far worse belief in demonology of the old days, has been eliminated, so divorce, except as sanctioned by the highest ethics, shall be eliminated from the national life, and homes will cease to be jeopardized by irresponsibility.

When America was more American there was no divorce. Was it not one of the Blue Laws of New England that declared that man and wife had either to live at home together or to live in jail apart.

Fault is found also with the multiplicity of sects,as if that were something new in the world, whereas there is not a division of religion among us, with but two exceptions, and they are reprobated by all America except their deluded adherents.

It is impossible to name a tenet believed in by the most extreme of present day sects that does not imply a higher conception of God and of conduct than that which represents Him as being so pleased by the sight of sinners in self-imposed chains and flagellations and inflicting upon themselves other expiatory horrors, and as rewarding them for doing so by patents of sanctity. Think, too, of the irrationality that reflects equally upon the justice of God and the common sense of man: namely,—that such penances of supererogation may be put in the "merit box" of the church to be applied vicariously in expiation of the sins of others. Yet, even worse things than we have so far cited were looked upon as a sublimated part of the moral system when men and women, not for the love of good but because of the fear of future flames everlasting, im

posed upon themselves vows of perpetual vassalage and groveling obedience to a superior more irrational than themselves, as if they had no will of their own, or, if so, did not know what to do with it.

So prevalent was this, the way of moral purity, in the medieval church that even the learned and devout Origen, as a remedy against concupiscence, unsexed himself in misapprehension of Matthew, xix, 12, and the mutilation was regarded by his admirers as a sign of sanctity.

Saint Evagrius, an orthodox authority on martyrology, cut out his own tongue to avoid the exercise of the gift of utterance that he thought stood in the way of godliness. Others flogged one another and themselves to such an extent that they often sank into death-like exhaustion, and an order was founded, named after this habit,- The Flagellants,— that spread far and wide. The members received ascriptions of superior piety in consequence, and an instance is recorded by the celebrated hagiographer and eulogizer of monasticism, Alban Butler, in his "Lives of the Saints," of an abbess' cutting the nose off each nun in her convent with a razor for the love of God.

In those days when the church, judging from its fruit, with here and there an exception, was sunk in materialism, or, like the Norway spruce, dragged its evergreen branches on the muddy earth and kept even the grass (indeed almost everything but noxious. weeds) from growing beneath them when they might have been directing their points towards the zenith, in