The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and
nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion and
statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that marriage is now
beginning to depopulate the country with such alarming rapidity that we
are forced to throw aside our modesty like people who, awakened by an
alarm of fire, rush into the streets in their nightdresses or in no
dresses at all. The fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack
marriage because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him
from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the very
real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency who declares
that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no longer recruits the
race, is destroying it.
As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our newspaper
controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket holders whose minds
the newspapers make. They still defend the citadel on the side on which
nobody is attacking it, and leave its weakest front undefended.
The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one. Christianity
began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this day the celibacy
of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing protest against its
compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's reluctant sanction of
marriage; his personal protest that he countenanced it of necessity and
against his own conviction; his contemptuous "better to marry than to
burn" is only out of date in respect of his belief that the end of the
world was at hand and that there was therefore no longer any population
question. His instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to
pleasure which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has
remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now stirring
more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline celibates whose
objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity of being supposed
to desire or live the married life as ordinarily conceived. Every
thoughtful and observant minister of religion is troubled by the
determination of his flock to regard marriage as a sanctuary for
pleasure, seeing as he does that the known libertines of his parish are
visibly suffering much less from intemperance than many of the married
people who stigmatize them as monsters of vice.