When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the same
objection to that individual appropriation of human beings which is the
essence of matrimony as to the individual appropriation of wealth. A
married man, he said, will try to please his wife, and a married woman
to please her husband, instead of doing the work of God. This is another
version of "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
Eighteen hundred years later we find a very different person from Jesus,
Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man with a family,
said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this, though not a
scientifically precise statement, is true enough to be a moral objection
to marriage. As long as a man has a right to risk his life or his
livelihood for his ideas he needs only courage and conviction to make
his integrity unassailable. But he forfeits that right when he marries.
It took a revolution to rescue Wagner from his Court appointment at
Dresden; and his wife never forgave him for being glad and feeling free
when he lost it and threw her back into poverty. Millet might have gone
on painting potboiling nudes to the end of his life if his wife had not
been of a heroic turn herself. Women, for the sake of their children and
parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that no unattached woman
would endure.
This was the beginning and the end of the objection of Jesus to marriage
and family ties, and the explanation of his conception of heaven as a
place where there should be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Now
there is no reason to suppose that when he said this he did not mean it.
He did not, as St. Paul did afterwards in his name, propose celibacy as
a rule of life; for he was not a fool, nor, when he denounced marriage,
had he yet come to believe, as St. Paul did, that the end of the world
was at hand and there was therefore no more need to replenish the earth.
He must have meant that the race should be continued without dividing
with women and men the allegiance the individual owes to God within him.
This raises the practical problem of how we are to secure the spiritual
freedom and integrity of the priest and the nun without their barrenness
and uncompleted experience. Luther the priest did not solve the
problem by marrying a nun: he only testified in the most convincing
and practical way to the fact that celibacy was a worse failure than
marriage.