The Institution of Marriage.

MARRIAGE may have had its social origination in pragmatism and convenience, or as a means of allaying jealousy by binding oaths made before the witness of the law and one's closest companions, but the spirit of the institution is a religious one. It is a form of practiced idealism, that the reproductive and companionable instincts of a creature should be contained in a single other, and that the burden of life should be henceforth shared between two as one individual body. I mean individual in its rawest sense, not dividual, but of course I recognise there exists such a thing in this world as an unhappy marriage. Due to the worry of such a thing there is nowadays a perceptible decline in marriage, at least in England, for it is perhaps these days more commonly feared over than desired as a complicated concern, of no real necessity to a loving relationship. The rights of a citizen are to-day almost consonant with the old privileges of the married spouse, and the nature of bequests is now so voluntary that none but the most traditional can be sure of a consanguine legacy.

   This notwithstanding, I do think marriage a measure of love both felt and intended, and though I cannot hold quite with Shakespeare that love 'is not love which alters when it alteration finds', nevertheless a divine and contractual oath of marriage outwardly represents, as nothing else could, the innermost feelings of the concerned. Of course, I must rule out cheats and charlatans as a minority in this world. It often feels as though they are not, for they can be so damaging in their effects on the majority, but it is necessary for a theist to believe in the overall goodness of mankind if he is to evince a genuine faith in his God. Despite harm and despite despair, I do not think a man truly in tune with his feelings can subsist without such a trust. For the sake of the defrauded we must have things like divorce, but these ought to be the unhappy exceptions in a generally faithful world, wherein more should feel secure than imperilled.

   I speculate without experience, although I have had opportunity to observe the experiences of others, that the happiest of marriages are those which allow for the largest share of freedom. Perhaps it is not necessary for the two spouses to sleep every night in the same bed or the same bedroom, or even to eat together or to talk with one another excessively. If such can be achieved with pleasure so much the better, but if not they ought not to be forced. Provided the vital moments of a married relationship are happy and stable, the rest may be adjusted according to circumstance. Even in the very sad example of infidelity, I believe that a certain level of understanding may be apportioned. It is an education to watch the 1945 film Brief Encounter. At its essence a marriage should be the first foundation of a family, and once the lives of descendants are involved it becomes a matter of high importance to persevere in the relationship notwithstanding errors and faults. Of course, if such a marriage proves truly happiness-destroying to either party it cannot reasonably be sustained, nor should be, and it is a good society which will tolerate and enable annulment or divorce for this reason.

   I am similarly minded in other social questions as abortion and euthanasia that in the very rarest of circumstances (circumstances one in ten thousand), which the better share of mankind may pray they never have to suffer, they have their justification. There are some diseases which cannot be sufficiently alleviated by drugs, there are some conceptions which cannot be tolerated by their mothers, and there are some marriages which cannot be persevered in any longer. The trouble with these many debates is always the implication of a free for all, that doctors enabled to euthanise will do so too often, or that abortion will become too readily resorted to in the stead of a natural acceptance of parenthood. There is force in this reflection, for I think that both abortion and divorce are perhaps too readily employed in England to-day. They may need to be more closely restricted in future to prevent greater harms than those they were originally intended to defray. Nevertheless, I believe they should be possible resorts for undesirable circumstances, and those who cannot or will not tolerate the entertainment of such circumstances are, in my view, refusing imagination where imagination is necessary.

   Yet even those bearing the less fortunate lots of existence are made the happier by meditation on the lots of others who, by good fortune or by deserved merit, have attained in their lifetimes something near to the fruition of ideal living: ideal love in an ideal marriage, ideal pride in an ideal parenthood, and ideal success in an ideal career. In novels we read of them and in dreams we dream of them, but they really do occur in the lifetimes of a good many people. Their achievements are ours as they are humanity's, for which we may rejoice in gladness though we ourselves remain in a setting of personal sadness. For it is a reflected pleasure indeed to know there are those who enjoy life as we forlorn once dreamt we might, in restive and abstracted hours. The truly defeated are defeated beyond the chance of envy and spite, and the wisdom of their hopelessness becomes a kind of internal victory to enjoy, a life nurtured in the jaws of death, a light burgeoned in the regions of outer darkness.

   Out there are those whose skin glows like amber in the evening sun of a Mediterranean luncheon, who with wine and oil, with bread and meat, with laughter and romance, eat in an historic alley under the boughs of elegant trees, and beside the pots of delightful flowers. They had swum at noon in gentle seas and sailed across blissful harbours, they had read improving books and observed uplifting architecture, and now they listen over their satisfying meals to fine music played by virtuosos indeed, and sung by bewitching damsels. They will rest to the diversion of beautiful dreams in the repose of clean and embracing linen, and come the morning will dress themselves with minds full of another day's happy prospects. But their greatest pleasure, which is carried with them in all circumstances and magnifies all the others, is an easeful and contented mind, which is ever kissing and caressing them through all their distinguished years. When they turn sad they wander in ecstatic melancholy through lamplit streets, or pray at a moving church which they never had visited before, secreted in some unlikely street corner, as a region of worship on a bounteous planet, nestled in a divine and eternally glorious universe.