A Mixed Marriage.
The Catholic Church has placed restrictions on unions that are not
blessed by Heaven. Benedict XIV. has called them DETESTABLE. A
sad experience has proved the wisdom of the warning. When the love
that has existed in the blinding fervor of passion has subsided into
the realities of every-day life, the bond of nuptial duty will be
religion. But the conflict of religious sentiment produces a divided
camp.
The offspring must of necessity be of negative faith. When intelligence
dawns on the young soul, its first reasoning powers are caught in a
dilemma. Reverential and filial awe chains the child to the father
and chains it to the mother; but the father may sternly command the
Methodist chapel for Sunday service; the mother will wish to see her
little one worship before the alters of the Church. Fear or love wins
the trusting child, but neither gains a sincere believer.
See that young mother, silent and fretful; the rouge that grief gives
the moistened eye tells its own tale of secret weeping.
Trusting, confiding in the power of young love, attracted by the wealth,
the family, or the manners of her suitor, she allows the indissoluble
tie to bind her in unholy wedlock. Soon the faith she has trifled
with assumes its mastery in her repentant heart, but liberty is gone;
for the dream of conjugal bliss which dazzled when making her choice,
she finds herself plunged for life into the most galling and
irremediable of human sorrows--secret domestic persecution. Few brave
the trial; the largest number go with the current to the greater evil
of apostasy.
Cassier loved a beautiful Catholic girl named Madeleine. Blinded by
the stronger passion, he waived religious prejudice. He wooed, he
promised, he won. The timid Madeleine, beneath her rich suitor in
position, dazzled by wealth, and decoyed by the fair promises that
so often deceive the confiding character of girlhood, gave her hand
and her heart to a destiny she soon learned to lament.
Fancy had built castles of future enjoyment; dress, ornament, and
society waved their fascinating wings over her path. Unacquainted
with their shadowy pleasures, her preparations for her nuptials were
a dream of joy, too soon to be blasted with the realities of suffering
that characterize the union not blessed by Heaven. Amid the music
and flowers, amid the congratulations of a thousand admiring friends,
with heart and step as light as childhood, Madeleine, like victims,
dressed in flowers and gold, led to the alter of Jupiter in the
Capitol of old, was conducted from the bridal alter to the sacrifice
of her future joy. Story oft told in the vicissitudes of betrayed
innocence and in the fate of those who build their happiness in the
castles of fancy: like the brilliancy of sunset her moment of pleasure
faded; the novelty and tinsel of her gilded home lost their charm,
and the virtue of her childhood was wrecked on golden rocks. She no
longer went to daily Mass; her visits to the convent became less
frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of
pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane
and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in
the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated,
feverish air of perverse influences that tainted her gilded home.
Sixteen years of sorrow and repentance had passed over Madeleine,
and found her, at the commencement of our narrative, the victim of
consumption and internal anguish, the more keen because the more secret.
The outward world believed her happy; many silly maidens, in moments
of vanity, deemed they could have gained heaven if they were possessed
of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were
the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning
of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the
blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the
flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever
flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of
regret over the ill-fated Madeleine, whose discolored eye and attenuated
form, whose pallid cheek, furrowed by incessant tears, told the wreck
of a beautiful girl sinking to an early tomb.
Her children--three in number--cause her deepest anxiety; they are the
heroes of our tale, and must at once be introduced to the reader.