The Marriage Tie
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THE MARRIAGE TIE.
It cannot be denied that, of late years, this safeguard of every nation, and more especially of every republic, has been rapidly falling into neglect, if not disrepute. We cannot take up a newspaper from any section of the country that we do not find blackened and stained by some record of conjugal infidelity. Now it is a married man who elopes with some young girl, before of unsuspected purity; now it is a married woman who deserts the man she has sworn to love and honor, ruins his domestic peace and blasts the prospects of their offspring, to throw herself into the arms of some seductive villain, soon to be deserted, accursed, and ruined forever. Sometimes it is the one thing, sometimes the other, but certain it is that the press teems with the details of such accounts, and that there is a large amount of matrimonial unfaithfulness in our midst which either never comes to light or is confined to a small circle and is hushed up. While we tremble at the number of such sins that do come to exposure we shudder at the amount of secret wickedness that boils and bubbles, a perfect witches’ cauldron, beneath many a fair seeming and beautiful exterior.
It is a fact, too, that this wide spread immorality works out its most glaring examples in what are called the educated and refined classes. The workingman and woman in the hard struggle which they mutually endure to gain the daily bread for themselves and children are not the ones to be led aside by loose sophistries or errant fancies.
The danger and the evil mostly lie among those who crave the excitements and enticements of gay society; who have time hanging on their hands which they are unable to fill; whose large animality and perverted intellectuality paralyse their moral natures and render them an easy prey to the sophisms of passion and the unrestrained impulses of poor fallible humanity. Those who have descended lowest in this mire of iniquity are those who have stood highest—the clergyman, the idol of his congregation—the young, the refined, the beautiful, the cynosure of all eyes, maiden, wife or mother, take these as the types. Are they not fair ones? Look at our daily prints, the faithful reflexes of current events, and answer.
It was an evil day for us when French morals as exemplified in French literature flooded the country like one of the seven plagues of Egypt. How much harm the issues of the French and English press have done in that department of fiction in which De Balsac, Sand, Sue, and Bulwer, in his earlier novels, stand preeminent, we can never fully ascertain. But it would be difficult, indeed, to make an over-estimate. That virus, first generated amidst the horrid monstrosities of the Revolution of ’97 has flowed down unto us through just such foul but flowery channels, and effloresced into a hundred wild vagaries, infidel theories, licentious sophistries. Who will underrate the influence of a loose popular literature in debauching the popular mind? Show us that man and we will show you a fool.
“Progress,” “Liberal Ideas” are good. They are good in very many things. But what may be good in material science may be evil and evil continually when applied to moral questions. The sacredness, the divine institution of the marriage tie lies at the root of the welfare, the safety, the very existence of every Christian nation. Palsied be the hand, blistered the tongue that would make one movement to defeat its holy purpose, or to weaken its binding nature by a single breath! When that goes, all goes—the domestic hearth—the dignity and the virtue of woman—the sweetness of childhood—the manliness of manhood. Let us hope that these dread signs which make every honorable man and well-wisher of his country tremble for the future, may be but the indications of a moral epidemic, fleeting in its nature, soon to pass away. Heaven grant that they be not the signs of a radical and deep-set evil.