WHICH HAVE OBTAINED IN THIS ISLAND FROM THE EARLIEST INCLUDING AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EARLY PROGRESS OF ERROR IN THE INTRODUCTION OF THE GOSPEL INTO BRITAIN, AND THE STATE OF RELIGION IN ENGLAND TILL POPERY HAD BY GEORGE SMITH, F.A.S., MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY, AND OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE. SECOND EDITION. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. MDCCCXLVI. Am I, by the levity of these remarks, offending any good church-going Refereader's susceptibilities? Then let him read his Church history, particularly for the first ten or twelve centuries of the Christian era. He will learn that by the pious fathers of the Church, the holy men who interpreted its doctrines (and, be it said, added to them wherever. they thought them defective), marriage was reckoned a sinful condition, into which the faithful were warned against entering, and from which they were counselled to extricate themselves with all possible dispatch. Not only so, but the Church acted upon its teaching. Material difficulties of every kind were thrown in the way of marriage. I speak by the card, for three or four years ago I went into this matter fully. What I had then to say, in another place, I am reluctant to repeat, making it a rule only to quote from the best authors, but a few of the facts are rather à propos in the present connection. In the early centuries all married persons were asked to abstain from cohabitation three days before the communion and forty days after Easter; next it was held to be as great a sin for a man to cohabit with his wife in Lent as to eat flesh (which I can well believe); then marriage was forbidden during Lent and at sundry other specified seasons until "there were but few days in the year in which people could get married at all." The forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity were extended to a ridiculous length; widows who had promised to live a single life were excommunicated if they married again; and any married woman who wished to be a nun was allowed to leave her husband and retire into a convent, while he was forbidden to take another wife. Some authorities went so far as to declare it doubtful whether married persons cohabiting with each other could be saved. By all, and I am speaking now of the first thousand years of the Christian era, the celibate life was regarded as the only holy life, and to promote it nunneries and monasteries were founded. It will be seen, therefore, that treating marriage as a civil contract, as I do, is by no means to fly in the face of the fundamental teachings of Christianity, as many worthy people suppose. It is only to repudiate canon-made law, founded upon a strained piece of symbolism-the mystic union of Christ and the Church-which would probably never have been insisted upon but for the fact that the Latin word for church was feminine. The effect of all this at the present day is the cccasional intervention of the Queen's Proctor. Now, if this official must be provided with a snug berth, I have a use to put him to. I would alter the period of his intervention. When two people propose to marry I would have a decree nisi granted in their favour. I would then place them under the supervision of the Queen's Proctor. If within six months facts were brought to his knowledge tending to show that the marriage would not be a happy one, let him intervene to prevent the matrimonial decree from being made absolute. He would have his work cut out for him, but that only shows the necessity for his existence. We want a Queen's tor badly, only let us have him in the right place. |