CHAPTER XVII

BELIEF in the Catholic doctrine of the indissolubility and sacramental nature of marriage must have had a marvelously elevating effect on the community, when such inhuman conduct was common, before the advent of evangelical faith set men at one another's ears! During the reign of Louis XIV both Church and State. made much progress in morals. Yet even that conspicuous period contained cardinals like Dubois and Terhorn and abbés like Teucin, while the vast majority of country clergy were moral men, and, despite the law of celibacy, led austere and virtuous lives.

But think of the profligate Louis XV, with all his faith in the sanctity of marriage, when he quarreled with his wife he lived in open sin with four sisters at the same time, one of whom he created the Countess of Mailly, and was quite offended, it has been said, when the fifth sister austerely declined interest in the delectable partnership. Surely even Salt Lake City is not a deterioration from that. He afterward abandoned these sisters for the former general's wife, whom he created Marquise de Pompadour. Everybody knows her remarkable history and how near she stood by him for seventeen years. Yet, as he stood at a window watching the poor creature's funeral procession pass, he heartlessly remarked to a bystander, the day being

rainy: "The Marquise has bad weather for her journey."

Her successor was Madame Du Barry, a common. prostitute, selected from the outcasts of Paris because of her skill in debauchery. She aided in the establishment of the notorious Parc aux Cerfs, a royal seraglio filled with the most beautiful girls procurable either by purchase or kidnaping. Du Barry, with her paid assistants, was the agent that by every means supplied the monstrous old reprobate with his preferences. They searched France for young girls to suit the king's fancy, "at a cost," it has been said, “of not less than one hundred million francs." The white slave traffic

of to-day is done by nameless scoundrels. Then these purveyors were the king's recognized and permitted mistresses, aided by an élite court.

So devout was this orthodox wretch after the manner of the time that he always insisted on having the child of fifteen years that he was about to ruin,— for his preference was for children,— kneel down by the bed and say her prayers in his presence.

After a residence in the seraglio of a few weeks or months, in case they became enceinte, the poor victims were thrown out into the world as if they were so many bedrabbled cats. Yet Louis XV and his various mistresses were eulogized by courtiers, flattered by priests, licentious pictures were painted by the greatest artists in their honor, and vile poems were written in their praise by the most prominent men of the time.

In contrast, a few years ago in that America that

CHAPTER XV

SELECTING the polyandrous individual alluded to in our preface as a specimen of American womanhood is like selecting a rotten apple from a branch of good ones as a sample of what the tree produced. To send such a pronouncement broadcast into the world through the Associated Press over the signature of a distinguished name is nothing short of slander. Such women are simply types of a certain class of women. They have existed in all ages, and are not peculiar to any nation or to any civilization, and no more represent the women constituting the wives, mothers, and daughters of America than a cretinous moral degenerate represents our athletic countrymen.

We trust we have said enough in previous pages of this paper to defend our people against this slanderous charge, which we regret especially in a clergyman, since it implies Unbelief in the goodness and power of God that is more wicked than many of the condemned heresies.

If God sent Christianity as a means of improving the world, and if, after a trial of nineteen hundred years, the world is getting worse, does not this statement, if true, mean that God himself is defeated? Thus there is more unbelief in pessimism than there is in a thousand honest heterodoxies. If such lamenta

tions are true, then indeed has Christ died in vain, our beneficent Americanism is a delusion, and we, of all men, not only are most miserable, but most disappointed.

Again it has been repeated that "the curse of America is divorce, and its concomitant evils," and that this attitude resulting in divorce is due to disbelief in marriage as a sacrament.

Marriage was considered one of the seven sacraments by nearly all Christians until the Reformation, when the people of that movement, in their effort to bring Christianity back to its original simplicity, not to limit it, reduced them to two,- namely, Baptism and the Lord's Supper. The five not allowed by the people of the reformed faith are,- Confirmation, Penance, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unc tion, because these were not known in their special light to early believers.

The word "sacrament as thus understood is not found in the Bible, was not used by our Lord, was not known to the primitive church. It is a post-apostolic term. Yet everybody now that has the slightest smattering of religious instruction reads into it meanings according to the way in which he has been trained, or not trained.

Whether calling the ordinances of the Christian church, in their various forms, "sacraments" or not adds anything to their sanctity still remains a question.

Christians to-day, as well as other religious and philanthropic people, as a rule, instead of troubling

Dubois' public career commenced after he had contrived the marriage of his pupil in 1692 to Mademoiselle Blois, a natural but legitimatized daughter of the pious Louis XIV, until whose time in France the custom in some parts allowed seigneurs — it was a publicly recognized part of feudality-to debauch the daughters of their vassals, without penalty. But, to resume, for bringing about this match of his pupil to the king's illegitimate daughter Dubois received a gift of the abbey of St. Just in Picardy. It was not until 1721 that he received the cardinal's hat. He died the tenth of August, two years later, we are told, "a victim of hard work and debauchery." Indeed most of the prominent men of those days accepting all the doctrines of the church were fathers of numerous "natural" children by various mothers, without its eing regarded a detriment to their dignity. Even ardinals did not hesitate to procure suitable mistresses for their royal masters, and great particularity, when possible, was exercised in this direction, for it seems that in order to be a king's mistress in those days the first condition was that she should " be a lady of quality." The objection to the Pompadour was not that she was an adulteress, but that she was not of a sufficiently high social position for the honor, not indeed thrust upon her, for she deliberately laid ingenious traps to catch the too willing king.

The poets, painters, and sculptors of the day created respective indecencies,- lewd books and pictures, indelicate sculptures and bronzes, which were sold with