need two parents: they need a stable and permanent home: they need a
spiritual marriage, a real harmony between their parents, as well as a
physical one. A child is not provided for when you have given it a home
and food and clothing, since it is a spirit as well as a body--a soul and
a spirit, a being craving for love, and needing to live in an atmosphere
of love. The young of no other species need this as children do, and
therefore, it is the concern of the community to see that the rights of
these most helpless and most precious little ones are safeguarded. I cannot
believe that any State calling itself civilized can ever disregard the
duty of safeguarding the human rights of the child, and I repeat its
human rights are not sufficiently met when its physical necessities are
guaranteed. But I go further. I claim that it is really the concern of all
of us that people who love should do so honestly, faithfully, responsibly.
Marriage should be permanent; that is true in a sense that makes it
important to all of us that it should succeed. Those who have loved and
ceased to love have not failed for themselves only but for all. They have
shaken the faith of the world. They have inclined us to the false belief
that love is not eternal. They have, so far as they could, destroyed
a great ideal, injured a great faith. People--and some of these are my
personal friends, and people for whom I have a very great respect--who
affirm that a legal or religious marriage is not necessary because their
relations to one another are not the concern of the community, may have, it
seems to me, a morality that is lofty, but not one that is broad, not one
that is truly human. It is not true (and, therefore, it is not moral) to
say that marriage is not the concern of other people. No one can fail in
love, no one can take on himself so great a responsibility and fail to
fulfil it, without all of us being concerned. Humanity is _solidaire_.
The community is and must be concerned in the love of men and women in
marriage. But what should be the nature of that concern? What should
we--the community--hold up as the right standard of sex-relationship, and
what methods should we use to impose it on others? I think you will have
gathered from what I have said already that, to my mind, marriage should
be a union that looks forward to being permanent, faithful, monogamous. It
should be the expression of a union of spirit so perfect that the union
of the bodies of those who love follows as a kind of natural necessity. It
should be the sacrament of love, "the outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace." And something of this perfection is to be found in
many marriages that seem (and are) far from complete. I often hear of the
lives of married people where there has been very much to overcome, where
perhaps the marriage has been entered into in ignorance and error; where
the passion that brought the two together has been very evanescent; where
it has soon become evident that their temperaments do not "fit"; where it
might easily be said that they were not really "married" at all: yet
there has been in these two such a stubborn loyalty to responsibilities
undertaken, such a magnificent sense of faithfulness, such a determination
to make the best out of what they have rather lightly undertaken; sometimes
even only on one side, there has been such faith, such honour, such
loyalty, such a refusal to admit a final failure, that a relationship poor
in promise has become beautiful and sacred. In face of such loyalty, the
theory that sex-relationships can rightly be brief, evanescent, thrown
aside as soon as passion has gone, seems to me very cheap and shoddy, very
unworthy of human beings. Marriage should be all that--shall I say?--the
Brownings made of it. But when it is not, there is still often much that is
left. Men and women, you cannot enter into one another's lives in this deep
and intimate way and go on your way as though nothing had happened. You
cannot tear asunder people so united without bleeding. You cannot make a
failure of it without immeasurable loss.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight."
Who that has once heard this can easily take anything less? Or who, having
loved in any of these ways, will lightly break the bond? I think that one
of the most profoundly moral relationships I have ever met between a
man and a woman was, in spite of all that I have said up till now, the
relationship of a man to a woman to whom at first he was not legally
married. It was her wish, not his, but they were not legally married. They
had no children, and she was unfaithful to him more than once, and yet this
man--and he did not call himself a Christian--this man felt that he had
taken the responsibility of that woman's life, and though he could easily
have put her away, and though, at last, she killed in him all that you
would normally call love between a man and woman, and he learned to care
for another woman, yet he would not abandon her because now she had grown
to need him, and he felt he could not take so great a human responsibility
as the life of another person and then cast it away as though it had never
been. That is morality. To such a sense of what human relationships demand
my whole soul gives homage. That seems to me a perfectly humane and,
therefore, truly moral idea of what love involves. Such a sense of
responsibility should go with all love. Passion cannot last, in the nature
of things, and, therefore, those who marry do so, if they know anything
at all of love--and, God help them, many of them do not--but if they know
anything at all of love, they know that it is physically impossible for
this particular bond always to unite them. They must be aware that there
is something more than that, something that must in the end transcend that
physical union.
Looking at marriage from that point of view, can one desire that it should
be anything less than permanent, indissoluble? That which God made, and,
therefore, which no man should put asunder? Let the community--both Church
and State--teach this. Let us make it clear that men and women should not
marry unless they do sincerely believe that their love for each other is
of this character. Let them understand that physical union should be
the expression of a spiritual union. Let them learn that love, though it
includes passion, is more than passion, and must transcend and outlive
passion. And let us insist that all should learn the truth about
themselves--about their own bodies and about their own natures--so that
they may understand what they do, and may have all the help that knowledge
can give in doing it. I hold that on such knowledge and such understanding
the community should insist, if it is to uphold the high and difficult
standard of indissoluble monogamous marriage. So only _can_ it be rightly
upheld.
I urge also that when a marriage takes place the State has a right and a
duty with regard to it. For the sake of every citizen, and most of all for
the sake of the children, it should "solemnize" marriage, and should do so
on the understanding--clearly expressed--that those who come to be married
intend to be faithful to each other "as long as they both shall live."
In doing this I believe the State does all--or nearly all--that it usefully
can to uphold the dignity of marriage and a high standard of morality. I do
not believe that it should seek to penalize those whose sex-relationships
are not of this character, except so far as legislation for the protection
of the immature or the helpless is concerned. And I do not think it should
compel--or seek to compel, for compulsion is, in fact, impossible--the
observance of a marriage which has lost or never had the elements of
reality.
Is this to abandon the ideal I have been upholding? I do not think so.
Let us refer again to the greatest of Teachers and the loftiest of
Idealists--Jesus Christ. See what He teaches in the Sermon on the Mount and
elsewhere. Everywhere He emphasizes the spiritual character of virtue
and of sin. To be a murderer it is not necessary to kill: to hate is,
in itself, enough. If you hate you are essentially a murderer. To be
an adulterer it is not necessary to commit adultery: to look on a woman
lustfully is already to have committed adultery with her in your heart. It
is the spirit that sins. So keep your spirit pure. It is not enough to keep
your oaths: you should be so utterly and transparently sincere that there
is no need and no sense in supporting your words by great oaths. "Yea" and
"Nay" should be sufficient.
You will notice that the Sermon on the Mount has been divided in this
chapter into a number of paragraphs, each of which begins by a reference
to the old external law of conduct, and goes on to demand a more searching,
more spiritual and interior virtue. "Ye have heard that it was said by them
of old time.... But I say unto you."
"Ye have heard that it was said: 'Thou shalt not kill' ... but I say unto
you that whosoever is angry shall be in danger of the judgment. Ye have
heard that it was said: 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto
you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart.... Ye have heard that it was said:
'Thou shalt not forswear thyself,' but I say unto you: 'Swear not at all.'"
What is the significance of such teaching? Surely that we are not to be
satisfied with keeping the letter of the law, but are to keep it in our
hearts. So clear is this that the Church has completely abandoned the
letter of the last precept. No one except a Quaker refuses to take an oath.
Every bishop on the bench has done so, and every incumbent of a living.
Nowhere throughout the Sermon on the Mount have Christians felt themselves
bound to a literal or legal interpretation of its teaching. No one wants
a man to be tried for murder and hanged for hating his brother. No judge
grants a divorce because a man or woman has "committed adultery in his
heart." Christ Himself did not _literally_ "turn the other cheek" when
struck by a soldier. His disciples everywhere pray in places quite as
public as the street-corners forbidden in the next chapter of St. Matthew,
and give their alms publicly or in secret as seems to them best.
It may be contended that in this spiritual interpretation of Christ's
commands it is very easy to go too far and "interpret" all the meaning out
of them. It is certain, however, that the danger must be incurred, since
nothing could make sense out of an absolutely _literal_ interpretation. It
would mean a _reductio ad absurdum_.
Apply such a literalism, for example, to the point at which for centuries
the Church has sought to apply it--the indissolubility of marriage. It is
admitted that since a phrase, of however doubtful authority, does make an
exception in favour of divorce for adultery, the Church can recognize a
law in this sense. But if we are to be literalists, it seems that a lustful
wish is adultery! Is this to be a cause for divorce? And if not, why not?
Obviously because we can no more apply such spiritual teaching literally
than we can take a man out and hang him because he hates his brother!
There we cease to be literal: how then can we fall back on a literal
interpretation at another point?
I claim that there is no ground whatever for a more rigid and legal
interpretation of our Lord's teaching about marriage than about taking
oaths or praying in public. I believe that Christ held that marriage should
be permanent and indissoluble, that only those people should marry who
loved each other with a love so pure, so true, so fine as to be regarded
rightly as a gift from God, who accepted their union as a great trust as
well as a great joy, whose marriage might indeed be said to be "made in
heaven" before it was solemnized on earth; but that He should insist on a
legal contract from which all reality had departed, or regard as a marriage
a union of which the most cynical could only say that it was made in hell,
merely because the Church or the State had chosen to bless or register it,
seems to me as unlike the whole of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount and
as far from the spirit of Christ as east is from west. It surely is not
conceivable that He to Whom marriage meant so much that He spoke of it as
being made by God, Who conceived of the union of a man and woman as being
the work of God Himself "Those whom God has joined together"--would have
cared for the shell out of which the kernel had gone, for the mere legal
bond out of which all the spirit had fled. Marriage should be indissoluble;
but what is marriage? I heard a little while ago of a girl of 19 who was
married to a man of 56. He was immoral in mind and diseased in body, and
at the end of a year she left him with another man. He divorced her, and
she is now married to that other man, and there are people who say that
this marriage, which, so far as one can judge, is a moral, faithful, and
a responsible union, blest with children who are growing up in a good
home, is no marriage because the wife went through a ceremony with this
other man before, and marriage is indissoluble. Marriage is indissoluble:
"Those whom God has joined together let no man put asunder." Did God join
those two together? They were married in a church. It is the Church that
should repent in sackcloth and ashes for permitting such a mockery of
marriage. Let the Church by all means do what it has so long failed to do,
emphasize the sanctity of human relationships, make men and women realize
how deep a responsibility they take in marriage, how sacred a thing is this
creative love, from which future generations will spring, which brings into
the world human bodies and immortal souls; which, even if it is childless,
is still the very sacrament of human love. Let the Church teach all that
it can to make marriage sacred and divine, but when it preaches that such a
marriage as that is a marriage at all it does not uphold our moral standard
but degrades it.
I have said enough before, I hope, to make you realize that I do not think
that when passion has gone marriage is dead. I have seen marriages which
seemed unequal, difficult, unblest, made into something lovely and sacred
by the deep patience and loyalty of human nature, and believe it is the
knowledge of such possibilities which makes Christian people, and even
those who would not call themselves Christians, generally desire some
religious ceremony when they are married. They know that for such love
human nature itself is hardly great enough. They desire the grace of God
to inspire their love for each other with something of that eternal quality
which belongs to the love of God. I have seen husbands love their wives,
and wives their husbands, with a divine compassion, an inexhaustible pity,
which goes out to the most unworthy and degraded. Yes, I would even go
so far as to say that unless you feel that you are able to face the
possibility of change in the one you love, that you can love so well that
even if they alter for the worse your love would no more disappear than the
love of God for you would disappear when you change or fail, you have not
attained to the perfect love which justifies marriage. But this is a
hard saying, and, therefore, those of us who believe in God in any sense
instinctively desire the blessing of God to rest on the undertaking of
so great a responsibility. We want our love to be divine before we can
undertake the whole happiness of another human being. Let the Church by all
means teach this, and I believe that future generations will conceive more
nobly and more responsibly of marriage for her teaching. But do not seek
to hold together those between whom there is no real marriage at all. When
seriously and persistently a man and a woman believe that their marriage
never was or has now ceased to be real, surely their persistent and
considered opinion ought to be enough for the State to act upon. Let no
one be allowed to give up in haste. Let no one fling responsibility aside
easily. Let it always be a question of long consideration, of advice from
friends, perhaps even from judges. But I cannot help feeling that when
through years this conviction that there is no reality in a marriage
persists, this is the one really decent and sufficient reason for declaring
that that marriage is dissolved. Let us have done with the infamous system
now in force, by which a man and woman must commit adultery or perjury
before they can get us to admit the patent fact that their marriage no
longer exists as a reality. Let us have done with a system which makes a
mockery of our divorce courts. I have the utmost sympathy with those who
denounce the light way in which men and women perjure themselves to obtain
release, but I affirm that the whole system is, in the main, so based on
legalisms, so divorced from morality, that the resultant adulteries and
perjuries are what every student of human nature must inevitably expect,
however much he may regret and hate them. It will be in vain that laws are
devised to prevent divorce by collusion, in vain that King's proctors
or judges detect and penalize here and there the less wary and ingenious
offenders. The law will continue to be evaded or defied. And the reason is
fundamental: it is that the law is not based on reality. It affirms that a
marriage still exists when it does _not_ exist. It demands that two human
beings should give to each other what they cannot give. And--the essence
of marriage being consent--it makes the fact that both parties desire its
dissolution the final reason for denying them! To force a woman to demand
the "restitution of conjugal rights" when such "rights" have become a
horrible wrong; to compel a man to commit, or perjure himself by pretending
he has committed, adultery, before he can get the State to face the fact
that his marriage is no longer a reality--is this to uphold morality? Is
this the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount? Let us once for all abandon
the pretence that _all_ the marriages made in churches or in registrars'
offices are, therefore, necessarily made in heaven. Let us get to work
instead to see that the marriages of the future shall be made in heaven,
and, above all, let us abolish the idea that a marriage is a real marriage
which is based on ignorance, on fraud, on exploitation, on selfishness. Let
us not dream that we can raise our standard of morals, by affirming that
every mistake that men and women make in a matter in which mistaking is
so tragically easy ought to imprison them in a lie for the rest of their
lives. But let us take the ideal of Christ, in all its grandeur and all
its reality, with our eyes fixed upon the ideal, but with that respect
for human personality, that respect for reality and truth, which makes us
refuse to accept the pretence that all the marriages we have known have
been made by God. Let us, at least, in perpetuating such blasphemies as
are some of the marriages on which we have seen the blessing of the Church
invoked, cease to drag in the name of Christ to the defence of a system
which has laid all its weight upon a legal contract, and kept a conspiracy
of silence about the sacred union of body and soul by which God makes man
and woman one.
VI
A PLEA FOR LIGHT
Jesus said: "If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not,
because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in
the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him."
My last address for the present[C] on the difficult questions that we have
been considering here, Sunday after Sunday, is a plea for light.
[Footnote C: Another address was added a few weeks later in response to
urgent requests.]
"Walking in darkness" has been, in sexual matters, the experience of most
of us. Even now, in the twentieth century, it is not too much to say that
most of us have had to fight our battle in almost complete darkness and
something very near to complete isolation.
There are two great passions connected with the bodies of men and women,
so fundamental that they have moulded the histories of nations and the
development of the human race. They are the hunger for food and the
instinct of sex. There is no other passion connected with our bodies so
fundamental, so powerful, as these two; and yet, with regard to the second,
most of us are expected to manage our lives and to grow up into maturity
without any real knowledge at all, and with such advice as we get wrapped
up in a jargon that we do not understand. We have been as those who set out
to sea without a chart; as soldiers who fight a campaign without a map. I
do not think this is too much to say of the way in which a large number of
the men and women that I know--even those of this generation--have been
expected to tackle one of the greatest problems that the human race has
to solve.
May I sketch what I imagine is the experience of most people? At some point
in our lives we begin to be curious; we ask a question; we are met with a
jest or a lie, or with a rebuke, or with some evasion that conveys to
us, quite successfully, that we ought not to have asked the question. The
question generally has to do with the matter of birth--the birth of babies,
or kittens, or chickens; some point of curiosity connected with the birth
of young creatures is generally the first thing that awakens our interest.
When we meet with evasion, lies, or reproof, we naturally conclude that
there is something about the birth of life into the world that we ought not
to know, and since it is apparently wrong of us even to wish to know it,
it is presumably disgusting. We seek to learn from other and more grimy
sources what our parents might have told us, and, learning, arrive at the
conclusion that in the relations of men and women there is also something
that is repulsive. And since, in spite of this, our interest does not cease
but becomes furtive curiosity, we also conclude that there is something
depraved and disgusting about ourselves.
Now, all of these three conclusions are lies; and, therefore, we set out in
life equipped with a lie in our souls. It is not a good beginning. It means
that almost at once those of us who persist in our desire to know are in
danger of losing our self-respect. We learn that there is something in sex
that is base--so base that even our own parents will not speak to us about
it; and because of that, and because a child instinctively does accept,
during the first few years of its existence, what its parents or guardians
say, we assume that there must be something bad in us, since we so
persistently desire to know what is so evil that nobody will speak of it at
all. Or if anyone does allude to it, it is with unwholesome furtiveness and
a rather silly kind of mirth, so as to increase in the minds of many of us
the sense that there must be something in our nature that we cannot respect
because nobody else finds it beautiful or respectable.
Our next step, especially if we are conscientious people, is to repress
that something. And here I want to say a word in answer to a number of
letters that I have had on the point which I raised early in this book,
when I claimed that women have to pay as great a tax and suffer as great
a hardship from repression as men do. People--both men and women--have
written to say that this is not true, and to such I wish to make my point
quite clear. I did not say that men and women suffered _in the same way_. I
said that they suffered _equally_; and since the question has been raised,
I should like just to answer it here. To me it seems, judging as far as I
can, from the people that I know, that--speaking very generally--passion
comes to a man with greater violence, and is more liable to leave him in
peace at other times. Passion is to a man who is of strong temperament like
a storm at sea. It seems the very embodiment of violence and force. The
mere sight of the sea angry almost terrifies one, even if one is perfectly
safe from the violence of the storm; but the depths are not stirred. And in
the case of a woman I would take a different figure of speech altogether,
and say that very often the strain on her is much less dramatic, much less
violent, and more persistent. I think of the strain as something like that
silent, uninterrupted thrust of an arch against the wall, of a dome on the
walls that support it. There is no sign of stress. But it is so difficult
to build a dome rightly that Italy, the land of domes, is covered with the
ruins of those churches whose domes gradually, slowly, thrust outwards till
the walls on which they rested gave way and the church was in ruins. That
kind of strain is easily denied by the very people who are enduring it. It
is so customary, so much a part of their life, that they are unconscious of
it.
No one who studies psychology to-day can fail to realize how unconscious
people often are of the seat and the nature of their own troubles. It is
true that the tendency to _exaggerate_ the importance of sex seems likely
to vitiate to some extent the conclusions of psychologists like Freud and
his disciples. But that they have revealed to us a mass of hitherto unknown
and un-understood suffering in the minds of both women and men, arising
from the continual repression of a passion whose strength may be measured
by the disastrous consequences caused by repressing it, no one who knows
anything at all of modern psychology can deny. Those who do not understand
their own trouble will often deny that the trouble exists, and deny it
quite honestly. But those who have become the physicians of the mind are
just beginning to learn how tremendous a sacrifice the world has asked of
women in the past while denying that it was a sacrifice at all!