What
grosser burlesque could there be than the conflict between the theory
and the practice? The law and the Church, claiming what few people
will deny, that marriage is an immensely solemn, even a sacred,
condition, have made entrance into it as easy as possible and the
escape from it as difficult. It is as if one were to say, "Revolvers
are very dangerous weapons, therefore they shall be placed within
the reach of infants, but they must on no account be taken away from
them, and once grasped they must never be laid down."
The most stringent rules have been formulated to prevent those people
from marrying each other who are least likely to want to--namely,
blood relations. But there is no law against total strangers meeting
at the altar for the first time, and the marriage by proxy of people
who have never seen each other has had the frequent blessing of
ecclesiastic pomp.
At a time when legal divorce was too horrible to contemplate they
made very pretty festivals of betrothing little children who could
not understand the ceremony or even parrot the pledge. Who indeed
can understand the pledge before its meaning is made clear by life?
And why should people be forced to make an eternal pledge whose
keeping is beyond their power or prophecy and from which there is
no release? What is it but a subornation of perjury?
Those who so blithely scatter flowers before bridal couples and
old shoes after them are perfectly benevolent, of course, in their
abhorrence of separating the twain if they begin to throw their old
shoes at each other; for they are sincerely convinced that if people
were permitted to do as they pleased, nothing on earth would please
them but vice.
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