"[41] In
season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would
forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage. For the Divorce Court and
all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it,
with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe,
perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a
protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment
that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the
sacredness of marriage. Man's progress, he says, depends on his keeping
such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these
conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to
laxity, he was the unsparing foe.
It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have
travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if
we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in his eightieth year and
Prime Minister of England, figured in a very unseemly affair which had
the Divorce Court for its centre.
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