Part 7 (1/2)

These facts are noteworthy because they show that had the official churches--the Roman, Greek and Anglican--been true to their charge and commission from their founder; had they been unworldly enough to defy the world and denounce its barbarous practices, we might have been far nearer Kant's ”sweet dream” of universal peace. But the churches, _as churches_, have done very little for the cause of the ”Prince of peace,” and now the world itself has outgrown their moral standard and looks to them for guidance and inspiration no more. By the light of reason alone, by the inspiration we gather from the _grands esprits_ of the race, above all by the teaching of Immanuel Kant in his beautiful treatise on ”Perpetual Peace,” we intend to do what in us lies to put down this surviving, crowning infamy of war, the very thought of which brutalises the mind, outrages its humanitarian instincts, and degrades the ideals whereby we desire to live.

But, surely, it will be urged, we cannot refuse to acknowledge undoubted benefits, both public and individual, which war has conferred in the past. It has welded nomad peoples into nations, bred courage, devotion, loyalty, unselfishness, self-sacrifice even to death in the hearts of those who have n.o.bly borne their part therein. Is not the soldier hero, the military chieftain, the idol of all mankind?

Doubtless he is, and unquestionably through the instrumentality of war great services have been rendered to the communities of peoples in the past and n.o.ble individual traits of character created. It is an axiom with us that the universe is so wondrously ordered that out of the worst things a soul of good may and does emerge, and so goodly is creation that its very evils become a source wherefrom good may arise.

What was good shall be good with for evil so much good more.

Thus, for example, the young lieutenant ordered to sink a hulk across the bay of Santiago, and his handful of companions have, by exposing themselves to imminent risk of an awful death, deeply stirred the feelings of their fellow-countrymen and filled us all with a sense of admiration at the heroism which can contemn danger and death in the execution of duty or the quest of glory. But we must ask whether humanity is in need of such exhibitions of bravery, whether there are not other fields of danger which offer tasks equally arduous and difficult of accomplishment? We are not insensible to the claims of military or naval heroism, but I confess I see much more to admire in Father Damien voluntarily surrendering himself to the slow and loathsome martyrdom of Molokai, more in the self-devotion of our ”white slaves,” as they must, alas! be called, who toil all the day and a deal of the night in a heavy, noisome, almost disease-laden atmosphere in the disgracefully crowded slums of our great cities, and all to earn a few pence wherewith to buy just enough bread to keep body and soul together in themselves and their children. Think of the matchbox-makers, who turn out a gross for a few halfpence, out of which they must supply some of their own materials. Think of the seamstresses, the s.h.i.+rt-makers and tailors' a.s.sistants in the veritable dens of East London, who by slaving for fifteen hours out of twenty-four can earn eighteenpence a day, out of which four or five s.h.i.+llings must be paid weekly for rent. Think of these mean, squalid surroundings in which a life of positively ceaseless toil must be lived, the patience and long-suffering with which it is endured, the silent martyrdom of monotonous, unrelieved existence prolonged over long years. Think of it, I say, and compare it with the intoxication of the battle-field, the cavalry charge, the roar of cannon and musketry, the rapid movements and counter-movements, the exultation which the sight of numberless men produces, grim, deadly determination on their faces, the thought of glory, the hope of renown, the dash of a few minutes, the stroke perhaps of a few seconds, the wild burst of untamed, savage human nature temporarily released from the restraint of reason! What cannot, what shall not man under such circ.u.mstances accomplish? Yes, we are not insensible to deeds of immortal daring, of courage, that must live for ever; nor to the memory of Leonidas and his Spartans, of the deathless glories of Thermopylae, of the unbroken chain of chivalric deeds from the days of ancient Greece to ”the thin red line” that broke the fiercest charge, and the handful of Englishmen that shot away their last cartridge and then stood to die with their country's anthem on their lips--we are not insensible to all this, but we say the day for it is past and gone, and the heroism of the battle-field must be consecrated anew to the service of peace and the poor. The millions on millions we are spending on those majestic engines of destruction, those s.h.i.+ps of ours that bastion the brine for England, what could they not do for the moralisation of the poor and outcast at our very doors in this city! Why, in three years that inferno of the East End, that foul, reeking, pestilential nest of tenements, unfit for even animal habitation, could be swept clean away and human homes erected which, to put it on the lowest grounds, would positively pay a dividend on the capital outlay, as has been convincingly proved over and over again.

”How long, O Lord, how long,” we exclaim with the prophet of old, shall men be consumed with this ign.o.ble fever, this war-madness which degrades the combatants far more than it exalts them, which senselessly destroys valuable property, scatters ruin broadcast, paralyses industry, robs the poor of all the bread of life, fills the land with mourning and desolation, with widows and orphans?--war, which we learnt from wild beasts, our ancestors, which cannot therefore determine a question of justice, which makes the wrong triumph as often as the right, which degrades all that touch it by isolating them for months, for years perhaps, from civilised life, which demoralises the victors, embitters the vanquished, and, by creating strife, perpetuates the possibilities of renewed strife--war, which at this moment keeps Europe in the condition of an armed camp, millions of men leading comparatively idle lives, with long hours on their hands which they cannot fill, with the inevitable results, the nauseating record of filth, disease and abominations too utterly loathsome even to think about--war, which is the curse of the poor and unfortunate, consuming the energies of men and the material means whereby their unhappy lot might be alleviated--war, the hard, cruel, relentless, inexorable monster of unregenerate man's creation--we, since no pope, bishop or priest will do it--we execrate it in the name of all we hold holiest, in the name of reason, morality and religion, and we pledge ourselves so to act, privately and politically, as to promote such measures--a federation of all English-speaking nations of the earth, if that will serve the purpose, or any other method equally or more serviceable--as will finally exorcise this last of the besetting demons of humanity, and fulfil thereby the ”sweet dream” of our master and inspirer, Immanuel Kant.

Ring out the old, ring in the new; * * * * *

Ring out the false, ring in the true; Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing l.u.s.t of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old; Ring in the thousand years of peace.

[1] Since these words were written the _Daily Chronicle_ of 10th September, 1898, quotes them as having been used by a distinguished living English general.

XI.

THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE.

There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns marriage. The insurrection of woman against the disabilities to which her s.e.x was in the past unjustly subjected, due perhaps more to custom and tradition than to the statute law of the land, has developed in more recent times into a serious attack on the central inst.i.tution of civilised life, on that fundamental fact of Nature on which posterity and society repose. We have had an outbreak in literature culminating in the giddy glory of the ”hill-top novel,” with its heroine ”who did,”

and in America what is tautologically described as the ”Free-Love Society” was founded to propagate the truth of what Rousseau euphemistically describes as _mariage apres la nature_. For all that, however, one seems to hear less of the ”hill-top” species, and possibly--with the problem play, without which no theatre was complete a couple of years ago--it may be fading into the mist of the past. It is with communities, we may take it, as with individuals. There are moments when, as it has been said, ”every one is an atheist, from archbishops downwards,” when a sense of the purposelessness and futility of perpetual combat seizes the most ardent. These are the dark hours when attacks are planned and delivered against the most sacred inst.i.tutions, when people are not at their best, but are restless, rebellious and impatient of restraint; for nations like individuals can go mad. Then it is that the wide-awake novelist and playwright see their opportunity, and the temporary success of the s.e.x-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts--none of the best--that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish minds. But we soon return to saner moments; our moral sense resumes its normal sway, and s.e.x-plays and romances fade away into oblivion.

Now, it need not be said that the contention on behalf of the rights of woman is heartily espoused by a movement which bases itself on the conception of reason and justice as the root facts of existence. There was no justice in the ”subjection of woman,” and we hold that those opportunities of learning which a cultured age opens up to man should likewise be at the disposal of his sister; that that freedom, which is the birthright of the man, to expand the energies, mental and moral, of his being to their fullest extent and in whatever calling, should also be acknowledged to be the right of woman. The const.i.tutional agitation for the recognition of her rights has met with notable success, and it has the fullest support of the ethical Church; but we believe that that agitation has been pushed too far by a very small and insignificant minority, and made to cover an attack on the inst.i.tution of matrimony, which her wisest friends see could only end in the ultimate downfall of woman herself. Such an agitation, such an attack, must encounter the most resolute opposition from a body which derives all its idealism and inspiration from a life motived, not by the sense, but by reason. Its leaders in America have p.r.o.nounced decisively against any tampering with the natural sacrament of marriage, and where they detect tendencies--as unfortunately they do in many of the States of their Union--to further loosen its bonds, they, with all the influence at their command, endeavour to strengthen them.

Let me now proceed to justify this att.i.tude of the ethical communion.

We do not base our action on considerations of authority such as move the Churches of Christendom. It is not because Jesus a.s.sisted at a wedding breakfast and performed an alleged wonder; not because the Apostle Paul calls marriage ”a great mystery in Christ and the Church,”

but because both Jesus and Paul and the Churches express a truth of nature itself, that the union of man and woman is not, and cannot be, the herding of animals; that the bestowal of the body cannot but be the outward symbol of an invisible bond which is the very soul and life of the contract. We thus go behind all Churches and apostles and ascend to the very roots of Nature herself, and discern in the golden glory wherewith she surrounds the ideal marriage the significance of her intentions in its regard--that it is her true and real Sacrament, that her sons and daughters are themselves its ministers, for they alone are kindled with the heavenly fire; that not the Church, not the priest nor ritual celebrates it, but these twain made one by that same

Love which moves the earth and heavens and all the stars.

That man has so regarded marriage as a sacred and sacramental fact is authenticated by history in an abundantly available form. No doubt, ages must have pa.s.sed before he emerged from his animalesque condition and abandoned polygynous and polygamous manners, the marriage by capture and purchase, which were the stages which mark the historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages pa.s.sed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emanc.i.p.ated man and woman. What the inst.i.tution _could_ become, what it _has_ become, shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In the n.o.bler days of Rome, under the republic and early empire, the same lofty conception animated her best sons. It was the decay of reverence for the sacred bond, the era when a woman's years were told by the number of her divorces, which called forth the solemn warnings of her moralist poets and philosophers, and ultimately brought about the emasculation of the nation's manhood and the downfall of the empire. We have not the remotest doubt but that a similar contempt in modern Europe for Nature's ordinance would involve us in the same catastrophe. A low estimate of marriage means contempt of woman; the contempt of woman means her degradation from her position at the side of man as his counsellor and his friend to that of his plaything, the instrument of his pleasure; that again means the enthronement of licence and licentiousness; that, the softening of the brain power of the manhood of the race, leading to degeneracy, imbecility, and ultimate extinction. We need no ecclesiastical organisation to tell us these things, nor threaten us with direst penalties here or hereafter. These are the penalties of nature's own aboriginal enactment. As it was in the beginning, so it is now, and so it shall be unto all time. No wonder St. Paul called marriage ”a great mystery”!

Now, though it be true that Nature's ideal is that which we call monogamy, it may be perfectly true that we have not yet reached that level of morality which makes that condition universally practicable.

That wisest of teachers, Jesus of Nazara, expressly recognised this distinction when he told the Jews of his own day that their lack of ethical enthusiasm, ”their hardness of heart,” as he accurately expressed it, the emptiness of their souls of everything save narrow nationalism and religious formalism--an emptiness by no means peculiar to them--was the sole reason which justified a departure from Nature's great ideal. ”In the beginning it was not so,” he declared, but ”Moses gave ye permission to write out a bill of divorce”. That one exception may be necessary still, but, let it be understood, it is not the ideal, and every one knows it, faithful and faithless alike, they whose honour is intact and they whose souls are smirched. It is an instinct in the human heart--no one can deny it--that love is for evermore.

Shakespeare is right, ”Marriage is a world-without-end bargain,” for love is felt to be eternal. The old Roman digest interprets nature with philosophic accuracy when it describes marriage as ”_Conjunctio maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani juris communicatio_”. ”The union of man and woman and the companions.h.i.+p of all life, the sharing of right, human and divine.” That is the majestic conception of matrimony as it took shape in the brain of those Roman masters of jurisprudence to whom we owe the law which is the nerve of civilisation. They learnt it from that ethical religion which we, too, reverently follow, from that morality which they found _in things, in themselves_, in Nature's plain teaching that the union of man and his wife was a sacramental fact and therefore indelible.

Are we asked for further evidence of this position? We see it as a law of our rational being, which refuses to believe that Nature makes no other provision for us than she does for the animals; that their instinctive and impulsive a.s.sociation should be the norm of man's intercourse with woman. Nay, we see Nature herself as she advances to the higher stages of animal existence antic.i.p.ating, in a sense, that ideal which was only to be fully realised in man. The lion, the king of beasts, as he is called, tends towards that ideal, and the elephant is believed to be even more strictly monogamous. The loves of birds, of doves and pigeons, are too well known to need more than a pa.s.sing mention, and the grief they experience on the death of their partner not unfrequently ends in a broken heart. But how much better is man than many animals, and what is merely instinctive in them shall not he consciously obey as his acknowledged law of life?

We may see the truth also in Nature's ordinance, that man's offspring must be educated in order to reach maturity; that training of a serious character is indispensably necessary to the development of the powers latent in them. But how is such training possible, except through the unceasing watchfulness of the parents'? People here and there darken counsel with the suggestion that the State should a.s.sume such responsibilities. Was there ever such a suggestion? As a matter of mere finance, we are told by the Vice-President of the Council, that the a.s.sumption of the quite partial responsibility for the education of the children now taught in the elementary schools of the denominational bodies of the country, would mean an addition of some millions yearly to the rates. The education rate is high enough in all conscience, but where the ”hill-top” theory would land us one can scarcely conjecture.

So urgent is this consideration of the claim which offspring has upon parent, so imperative the need that children should be fittingly instructed so as to be worthy citizens of a great community, that we find writers like Karl Pearson, in his _Ethic of Free Thought_,[1]

consistently excepting from the operation of the free-love gospel those unions which have resulted in the procreation of children. Mr. Pearson being of the school of those who deride marriage as ”the tomb of love,”

”the source of the stupidity and ugliness of the human race,” his admissions as to the necessity of maintaining some element of permanence in the contract, if only for the sake of children, is well worthy of our attention. It shows how grounded in nature is that conception of the marriage tie which the Roman digest has put before us.

We may see the truth, once again, in the acknowledged instability of the pa.s.sional element in human nature--particularly in man. It is nothing short of amazing to see this very instability urged as a reason why the marriage tie should be still further weakened, as though man should deliberately subject himself to the vagaries of sense, instead of the guidance of reason. We hear much to-day about the ”return to nature,” and, soundly interpreted, that gospel sounds like a breath of pure mountain air after the stifling atmosphere of modern convention and unreality. Would to heaven, I say from my heart, that we were more natural, that a greater frankness and directness marked our intercourse with one another, that the shams and pretences of so much of our social life were made away with, that our lives were more open and free! The grand old Stoic maxim had it thus: _Live in accordance with nature_.