Marriage and the Law of God

by Frank J. Sheed

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The Bible, which has a marriage in the first chapter, is shot through with intimations of God's will upon sex and marriage. In its main lines His teaching is to be found in the Old Testament; Christ Our Lord developed and clarified this in His time upon earth, and has continued to teach it through His Church in the twenty centuries since.

Broadly it may be summarized in two statements: that the powers of sex must never be used outside marriage; and that marriage is monogamous and unbreakable save by death.

Consider first the restriction of the use of sex to marriage. This involves two consequences: sex must only be used between a man and a woman: and only within the framework of a legal union. Concubinage was tolerated among the chosen people for a long enough time, but it had disappeared before the coming of Christ: and concubinage was, in any event, a state recognized and regulated by law: it was not casual intimacy, still less mere promiscuity: for neither of these has Scripture a moment's tolerance. A man and a woman must not unite their bodies merely at their choice but only within the framework of a legal union: no union of bodies, or any use of the sex organs, was in any circumstances thinkable save between a man and a woman—not by either alone, or in union with another person of the same sex, or with an animal. Christ Our Lord simply took over these laws, adding one profound development—for He taught that sex might be misused even in the mind, apart from any outward act—the man that looks after a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. The Church has had nothing to clarify here or make in any way plainer. Nor, if what has been said in the last chapter seems to make sense, is it hard to see the reasonableness of this total restriction: it enables the sexual powers to do what they are there for: and to be most fully themselves. Only within marriage do the powers of sex serve the new life by which the race is continued. For only from the sexual union of a man and a woman can children be born, obviously sex's primary purpose; only in their legal union is the ordered framework of life possible in which the children can be reared to maturity. And in marriage, as we have seen, sex can attain its own maturity as an expression of the total union of two personalities.

So we come to the second great law—the law of marriage as the union of one man with one woman till death (as with concubinage, so with polygamy; Christ tells us that Moses allowed it because of the hardness of men's hearts, but He Himself restored the original law). Here the teaching of the Church holds a very delicate but quite essential balance between fixity and freedom. Marriage is an institution whose nature and laws do not depend upon man's choice. Marriage is what it is: God made it what it is because thus it is best for the human race. Man cannot alter it: he can only take it or leave it. And in that precisely lies his freedom. He can take it or leave it. A man or a woman cannot be forced to marry: either is morally free to marry or not to marry (and of course either is physically free to enter into any sort of living arrangement with the other). We can choose whether or not to marry: but we cannot choose what marriage is. The Church expresses all this in the statement that marriage is a relationship resulting from a contract: the contract is made by the man and the woman, the relationship that results is made by God. The man and the woman agree to take each other as husband and wife for life: God makes them so, taking them at their word.

Thus the laws relating to marriage fall into two divisions—laws about the contract, laws about the relationship.

Consider the contract: a man and a woman agree to marry. There are two key words here— agree and marry. Their agreement must be unforced, otherwise it is not an agreement at all: prove that either of them was compelled, and the contract vanishes. Similarly it must be an agreement to marry, that is to enter into a union for life, to the exclusion of all others, a union that is meant by God to produce, and normally will produce, children. If they enter into an agreement to take each other for a term of years, or till one or other wearies of the arrangement, or to the total exclusion of children—then it is not a contract to marry. Prove any of these things and the contract vanishes. There are other ways in which what looked like a marriage contract turns out not to be one (as, for example, if either is married already, or is impotent, or if the due form is not observed), but the two we have dwelt on illustrate the principle best. Before God brings the relationship called marriage into existence, the man and woman must have made a contract to marry. Where it can be shown that a given couple have not done so, the competent authority will grant a decree of nullity. Where they have done so, there is a marriage. God has brought the relationship into being. If marriage were only a contract, it would, like all other contracts, be breakable by the agreement of both parties to it. But it is not. Once they have made their contract, the parties are bound, not by it, but by the relationship that follows. Let us look more closely at this relationship.

God has taken a man and a woman at their word. They are now husband and wife, made so by God. They are not simply a man and a woman who have agreed to live together for certain agreed purposes. If that were all, they would have entered into an arrangement; but marriage is not an arrangement, it is a relationship. It is hard to make this clear, though once one has seen it nothing could be more illuminating. A man adopts a son: that is an arrangement. A man begets a son: that is a relationship. In marriage the man and woman have not simply adopted each other as husband and wife, in the way a man adopts a son. They have become husband and wife, God has made them so. They are united, not simply by an agreement to be so, but by some vital reality. The relationship of husband and wife is not brought into being in the same way as the relationship of parent and child, for the latter arises in a union of bodies, the marriage relationship in a union of wills: but it is all the closer and more real for that. A husband and wife are not less vitally and really related to each other than they are to their own children, but more.

Our Lord makes His own the phrase of Genesis which puts this fact with dazzling clearness: "they shall be two in one flesh." In the nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel we find him saying to the Pharisees: "A man therefore will leave his father and mother and will cling to his wife and the two will become one flesh. And so they are no longer two they are one flesh: what God, then, has joined, let not man put asunder." In the fifth chapter of his epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul quotes the same phrase of Genesis, leading up to it by a figure of speech which at once re-asserts the new oneness that marriage has brought into being, and lays its foundation deeper than the natural eye of man can pierce: for he compares the union of a man and his wife with the union of Christ and His Church. "Wives must obey their husbands as they would obey the Lord; the man is the head to which the woman's body is united, just as Christ is the head of the Church, the Saviour on whom the safety of his body depends. Why then, women must owe obedience at all points to their husbands, as the Church does to Christ. You who are husbands must show love to your wives, as Christ showed love to the Church when he gave himself up on its behalf . . . and that is how husband ought to love wife, as if she were his own body; in loving his wife, a man is but loving himself . . . That is why a man will leave his father and mother and will cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. Yes, these words are a high mystery and I am applying them to Christ and his church."

There is something in the modern temper, of the Western world at least, which is so jarred by the opening phrase "Wives must obey their husbands"—that we do not read on to the vastly exhilarating truth that follows and, if we do, are not exhilarated by it. The phrase seems to sum up appallingly all that business of masculine domination from which women feel they have fought free. But it certainly does not mean that. The woman's duty of obedience is balanced by the man's duty of love: she is to be obedient, not to a sultan issuing ukases, but to one who loves her as himself. The model is the obedience of the Church to Christ, and Christ is not tyrannical; Christ commands, but gives love, not fear, as the reason for obedience—"If you love me, keep my commandments." Further, the Church has clarified the obedience due. In the encyclical Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XI writes: "This subordination, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman, both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband's every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to a wife. In short, it does not imply that the wife should be put on a level with those who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment or of their ignorance of human affairs. What it does is to forbid the exaggerated liberty which has no care for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to make her own the chief place in love."

The family is a society, and someone must have the final word, otherwise nothing is ever decided but all is in permanent debate. An endless tug-of-war is a miserable business. Nor would it be for the good of family life if the question of headship should be settled in each family by a contest of personalities, won in some families by the man, in some by the woman. It is not a question of men being superior to women—the need any society has for an authority to order it aright does not mean that those who wield the authority are in any way at all superior as persons to those who obey it. In secular society Queen Elizabeth, for example, was not greater than her subject, Shakespeare; in the Church, Gregory IX was not a holier man than his subject Francis of Assisi. The wielding of authority is a function, a necessary function, giving no reason to feel proud, any more than obedience to it gives reason to feel humiliated.

That the father is the head of the family does not mean that the mother cannot exercise authority: both must be honoured. And that the mother is the heart of the family does not mean that the father need not love: he, who must love his wife as Christ loves His Church, does not suddenly shut off all love to the children born of his love for her. Both wield authority and both love, but the emphasis is different. And there is a similar unity with difference in the matter of training the child. The father's part is indispensable; but in all the earlier years the mother has the main contact with the child. Its attitude to life it must learn from her. She is the custodian of the standards—standards of manners, standards of morals—of what is right and wrong, good and evil, permissible and forbidden, tolerable and intolerable. If she does not teach these things, the child will not be taught. In all the Christian centuries, the task has been simple enough. The mother had merely to hand on to her children what had been handed on to her. But in our own century that is changed. The world into which the child is to go from her will deride the moral standards—not merely disobey them as people at all times have, but deny their validity. The mother now who would do her duty as custodian must tell her children not only what the standards are but why they are, must arm them with that understanding of the real universe in which the moral laws will be seen for what they are, and the world's assault upon them for what it is.

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In entering into this union, each has given to the other (and to the other exclusively) the right to sexual union. Notice that sexual union is a thing due, a right: either is entitled to demand it of the other and, unless there is a very serious reason, neither can refuse it to the other. For the man to refuse his wife or the wife her husband without good reason would be a grave sin. But notice that it is a right, not to any sexual union but to normal sexual union, the union by which, in the way of nature, children are conceived. Abnormal sexual unions are forbidden to the married as to everyone else; abnormalities in the normal sexual union—all the ingenious trickeries that interfere with it to prevent children being conceived—are likewise forbidden. The sexual act must be wholly itself.

And the right thus given is no merely legalistic right— a mere right to the use of the other's body for a specified purpose. The will must go with it; as far as possible—it is not always possible, the feelings cannot be commanded— the whole personality must go with it. The marriage act is a duty, certainly, but this is one duty that cannot be done simply as a duty: it must be done generously or it is not being done at all. It can never be repeated too often that the sexual union is not simply a union of bodies; it is a union of personalities, expressing itself in the union of bodies. But precisely because the bodily union has so splendid a function, it should itself be splendidly performed. There is a technical competence to be learned by each, for this is an action not of each individually but of two in unison; each surrendered totally to the rhythm of the other. Where it is rightly done, there is an exquisite physical pleasure for both, for so God has made man and woman. Both are meant to experience this pleasure—each must strive that the other may have it. In its fulness the act not only expresses the union of personalities, the total giving of the body uttering the total giving of the self, but intensifies and enriches it. Where there is any want of generosity in the act by either, the union of personalities is impoverished.

It is interesting to observe how the Church, pictured often enough as the enemy of sex, insists upon all this.

In his widely read book, Pardon and Peace, the Passionist Father Alfred Wilson lists some questions that husbands and wives might ask themselves to test how far their sexual life together approaches the ideal: the first two are especially for wives: "Have I habitually failed in my duty, by giving to intercourse only a reluctant and condescending acquiescence, and by my grudging attitude largely destroyed the value of such acquiescence?"

"Have I been selfish in the refusal or performance of intercourse? Consulted only my own mood and never attempted to accommodate myself to my partner's mood or done so only with the pose of a martyr to duty?"

For men: "In the preliminaries of intercourse have I nauseated my wife by my complete failure to show a delicate and sensitive consideration for her feelings and desires?"

"Do I realize that whilst the biological purpose of intercourse is procreation, the psychological purpose is the expression and preserving of a unique love?"

"Have I raised my mind to God during intercourse and humbly thanked Him for this pleasure, this sacramental expression of love . . . or have I instead considered myself 'outside the pale' and mentally skulked away from His presence and His love?"

The Church, then, sees that the health of marriage requires a positive attitude to sex. It must be whole-heartedly accepted as God's plan for the continuance of the race; its pleasure must be accepted simply and frankly and with all gratitude to God, by whose will it is there. Which brings us to the other element in the Church's thought upon marriage. Just as there must be a positive attitude to sex, so there must be a positive attitude to God. A negative attitude to either is corrosive. God must not be seen primarily as someone we can offend, or sex primarily as something we may misuse. But God must be seen as the fount of life and of love, sex as a channel of life and of love.

Why single out God and sex in this way? Because it is precisely by the lack of a full and positive acceptance of one or other that marriages otherwise healthy most often fail. Marriage itself is the union of two lives, a man's life and a woman's life. Now most people conceive this relation of a man to a woman positively enough—not as a set of prohibitions to be obeyed or pitfalls to be avoided but as love, joy in each other, a mutual self-giving, a certain completion of each by the other, willingness for sacrifice. All this is right and human, essentially healthy and vitalizing. It needs no particular discussion because, as I have said, most people see marriage like that. But what most people do not see is that it can stay like that only if both God and sex are rightly understood and whole-heartedly accepted.

The trouble is that people feel instinctively that there is some sort of incompatibility between God and sex, so that to the believer it seems irreverent, and to the unbeliever at least incongruous, to mention them together. Thinking that they cannot well choose both, people tend to opt for one or the other. Those who opt for sex, leave God wholly out of their picture of marriage; those who choose God, while they cannot leave sex out, admit it in a shuffling shamefaced way, as though wondering what God can possibly think of them!

Thus one may ignore God for the sake of sex or belittle sex for the sake of God. Either way marriage is less vital than it should be. Consider the greater error first—the concentration upon sex to the ignoring of God. To ignore God means quite simply that no part of life is seen rightly or can be lived rightly. God made all things, His will is the only reason why they exist, what He made them for is their only purpose. Leave God out and you leave out the reason for everything and the purpose of everything. We cannot be right about life if we are wrong about God; but we cannot be right about marriage if we are wrong about life. Marriage is seen out of its context if life is seen wrong; sex is seen out of its context if marriage is seen wrong. Out of its context sex, as a union of bodies, or even as a union of persons, looms larger than it should; and is expected to yield a fruit of happiness and human satisfaction which by itself it was never meant to yield, which it is simply not big enough to yield.

Consider now the lesser error—the belittling of sex for the sake of God. This error is more likely to affect Catholics) if and in so far as they lack a positive attitude to God and to sex. It is the feeling that there is something shady about the sex appetite and its satisfaction—that God allows it but looks the other way. But this is to fail to see the glory of the power in itself. By the use of it man co-operates with the creative power of God. The sexual act is not something invented by man's lust and tolerated by God: it is ordained by God Himself as the means for the continuance of man's race. Nor did God plan it as a strictly mechanical means for the production of new life, to be performed dutifully and without elation, for it was God who attached the physical ecstasy to it, so that it is not only a channel of life but a channel of love too.

But their sexual life will only be all that it should be in the life of husband and wife if each grasps fully the meaning both of the act and of its pleasure, and strives wholeheartedly for that competence in it and joy in it which each is entitled to expect from the other. There is of course danger here as there is in all life. The physical pleasure can become overmastering: there can be excess within marriage as well as outside it. The remedy for this excess—as indeed also for that distrust of the physical side of marriage which is the opposite error—is to relate sexual life to God, to thank Him for so good a gift (as Chesterton says we should thank Him for wine) by moderation in the use of it, and to offer it to Him for sanctification as naturally as the rest of life is offered. There is, as Wingfield Hope says in Life Together, "an irrational instinct to keep our sex life segregated from God—if sex life sidetracks from God, it may ruin the happiness of any marriage. We must not leave God out of any part of our married life, or of any of our thought on marriage."

That sex is not outside the pale of spirituality God has shown, as we have already seen, in making the marriage union a symbol of the union of Christ with His Church; He has shown it even more startlingly in making marriage a sacrament. For a sacrament is a means of grace, and grace means an energizing of God's life in the soul of man, in its first initiation establishing, and in its increase intensifying, the union of the soul with the Blessed Trinity. Every marriage is a relationship whereby God makes the man and woman one flesh; but to the marriage of the baptized, a greater glory is added. When a baptized man and a baptized woman marry, they receive the sacrament, whether they know it or not; the union with each other, which reaches down to the deepest and most radical urgency of their body, enriches their union with God Himself in the spiritual depths of the soul. Grace is the highest effect of Matrimony, as of any sacrament. But in Matrimony the sacrament works outward as well, to vitalize the whole relationship. To quote Casti Connubii: "The sacrament perfects natural love . . .", again, "the husband and wife are assisted not only in understanding, but in knowing intimately, in adhering firmly to, in willing effectively and in successfully putting into practice, those things which pertain to the married state, its aims and duties."

From all this it should be clear that it is from no undervaluing of sex and marriage that the Church teaches that Virginity is higher and holier still—not any virginity, be it noted, not the virginity of the impotent or the timorous or the reluctant or the uninterested or the otherwise occupied, but the virginity which is a dedication to God of vast energies of love, which but for this higher dedication would have found their issue in marriage. Indeed it would seem that the primacy of such dedicated virginity is one great bulwark of marriage. Marriage is most honoured where virginity is honoured still more. For both are expressions—at two levels, one high, the other higher—of the same truth that sex is a gift of God: men can profane it, but there is no profanation in it save such as men import into it.

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In truth the Church is a puzzle to anyone who does not grasp the principles on which she is thinking in this matter. On the one hand she seems so niggardly about sex—no intercourse outside marriage, no contraception, no divorce—and on the other hand she sees so much splendour in it. But there is no contradiction. Alike in her glorification of sex and in her prohibitions there is one guiding principle. Sex must be itself. It is sex being wholly itself and fulfilling its own function that she glorifies. All the things she prohibits are ways of denaturing the sexual act or cutting it off from its evident purpose.

The act is itself when the bodily organs of husband and wife are properly in contact throughout, and the seed is allowed to take its natural course. It is denatured when and if these conditions are lacking. In solitary vice, for instance, there is no contact because the act is of one person alone. In homosexuality, there is no union of a man with a woman. Even when there is a man and a woman and an approximation to the sexual act, the contact may be broken before the act is complete, or artificial barriers may be introduced so that the organs are not properly in contact at all—the result being that the seed is prevented from going its natural way, the object being to have the pleasure of sex without the risk of generation. Upon all this the Church is adamant. She insists upon the integrity of the sexual act: the act must be wholly itself, it must be allowed to have its natural consequences. To deform or denature it is to degrade it; and to degrade an act of that vital significance is to damage man far beyond the measure of any suffering it is intended to alleviate.

The Church, then, insists that the sex act be not performed, save in its integrity. Equally she insists that it be not performed outside marriage. By the one insistence she safeguards the act itself, by the other she safeguards its function. Her teaching here is wholly in accord with the line of reasoning sketched in the previous chapter. The power of sex is aimed, obviously, at the generating of children. It can serve other purposes, too—at the lowest level it can give pleasure, at the highest it can at once express and intensify the union of personalities—but these other purposes must not be sought in a total divorce from its direct function, the continuation of the race. The institution in which sex best serves this aim is, we have seen, marriage—and indissoluble marriage, the permanent union of the father and mother. Where there is no union at all between the parents, the child is in a desperate insecurity; where there is a union, but not permanent, a union with divorce and remarriage seen as an ever-present possibility, the child's training towards maturity and full membership of the human race will be profoundly damaged. Marriage is the one condition in which the main purpose of sex is secured. The sexual union belongs in marriage and only there.

This is not to say that husband and wife must intend every act of sexual union to be procreative, but only that when they do have sexual union they shall have it in its integrity. They may know that procreation is impossible—for instance, because there is a child already in the womb, or because the wife has passed the age of child-bearing. They may feel that procreation is undesirable— because of great danger to the wife's health or a desperate economic situation—and therefore restrict the act to times when conception is improbable. Provided they have the union in its integrity, not deforming or distorting or mutilating it, doing nothing to interfere with the course of nature, then they are within their rights. Such uses of sex still serve sex's primary purpose: they serve the children already born, by making the marriage a firmer, warmer, lovinger thing; if no children are, or can be, born, they still serve sex's primary purpose, for they help to add one more strong and happy marriage to the whole institution of marriage, and it is upon the institution of marriage that the new-born generations depend.

Thus it will be seen that the Church's object is not, as sometimes supposed, that families should have as many children as possible; her concern is that a power so supremely valuable as sex should not be played with. Children, if one may say a thing so obvious once more, have to be not only brought into the world, but brought up in the world; and upon this, as upon all else, men must use their reason. To bring into the world twice as many children as father and mother are financially competent to support, and physically or psychologically competent to handle, is not necessarily to make the right use of the power of sex. A given couple may feel the certainty that it is God's will that they take no thought of such factors and rely upon Him to help them no matter how many children may come. But short of such a special vocation, husband and wife may, as we have seen, decide that there is deeply serious reason for not having another child— for the moment, perhaps, or even in any foreseeable future.

The reason must be serious. Trifles are not enough. That the birth of other children might mean riding in a less expensive car or sending the children to a less fashionable school would not justify the decision to have no more: for that would be making the ornaments of life more valuable than life itself, and not only could no Christian see things so, but only the devitalized could. Indeed for one who has grasped what a human being is— made in God's image, immortal, redeemed by Christ—only the most serious reason would be strong enough to support such a decision. But where such serious reason exists husband and wife may agree to abstain from sexual intercourse, for a time, or permanently. Or they may agree to have it only at times when conception is most unlikely. In all this there is no want of trust in God, but simply an awareness that in the procreation of children human beings have a necessary part to play, and that they must use their judgment prayerfully as to how they shall play it.

The denaturing of the marriage act is one of the two modern assaults upon the integrity of marriage; divorce is the other. The arguments for divorce are all too obvious. A marriage is a failure, humanly speaking irredeemable. It is causing great mental suffering, perhaps bodily suffering too, to husband and wife. The Church teaches that in such circumstances the suffering party may withdraw and live apart: but may not remarry while the other party lives, for the marriage itself cannot be broken. It is a hard teaching, and to the generality of men seems even repulsive. For two people in the prime of life thus to be condemned to celibacy, especially after marriage has fully aroused them sexually, can mean sheer anguish. Anyone with much experience of life has met case after case where his whole soul longed that the law might be different. The suffering caused is so great a thing, the way of relief seems so small a thing.

But the way of relief is not so small a thing. For it is impossible. It was not through any defect of love that Christ said "What God has joined together let not man put asunder"—Christ, who was so totally love that men who know nothing else about Him know at least that He loved all of our race as it has never been loved.

God makes the man and woman to be husband and wife: no one but God. Neither the State, nor the man and woman themselves with all their striving, can unmake the relationship God has made.[1] If there is cruelty in the refusal to permit divorce and remarriage, it is not the Church's cruelty, but God's. And God is love.

Somehow, this law, like every law of God, must serve love. The suffering which the law may cause must be outweighed by a greater good for man and a greater suffering avoided. And, in this matter, however much our hearts may be wrung by the sight of individual anguish, the greater good, the balance of advantage, is not hard to see.

The happiness of society as a whole, of the generality of men and women—and still more of children—is bound up with the health of marriage: it provides the one stable framework, the underlying security, without which men and women, and children still more, feel the wretchedness of their insufficiency. Where a given marriage is unhappy, this wretchedness falls upon the individuals concerned: and there are marriages where one feels that everyone concerned, even the children, might be the gainers for ending them and letting the parents start afresh with new partners. One need not stay here to observe that the second marriage is not necessarily much happier than the first— the innocent party may have contributed to the first failure, and in the same innocence will bring the same defects of character and personality to make their modest contribution to the failure of the second. But this is beside the point. The suffering caused to individuals by a marriage that fails is a trifle compared to the suffering caused throughout society by the breakdown of marriage itself.

And unhappily there is no way of breaking individual marriages without damaging the institution of marriage. For any human power to break a marriage because it is unhappy means that marriage as such is breakable; and if marriage as such is breakable, then anybody's is, everybody's is. No two people are any longer united in a relation permanent in itself, but only in an arrangement dependent upon whim or mood or feeling or the thousand chances of life. The institution of marriage no longer exists and society has taken a first step on the road to chaos.

This is not a rhetorical exaggeration. The Church knows, and seems to be alone in knowing, that wedges have thin ends. The world always points to the thinness of the wedge's point of entry, and accuses the Church of making a fuss about a trifle: what harm, says the world, can possibly come from admitting an exception and granting relief in a case so poignant, and happily so rare? The Church sees the thickness of the wedge that lies behind that thin edge, awaiting entry. "To do a great right, do a little wrong" is a plea that the modern man finds irresistible. But there is no such thing as doing a little wrong: the smallest yielding of principle, for however good a cause, is a hole in the dyke and you will not keep out the sea. There is a principle, for instance, that innocent life may never be taken. Of course, says the world: but to save the life of a mother, one may surely destroy the infant within her. The Church is seen to be unyielding and is thought to be heartless—even her own members might wish her to yield a little to common humanity. The Church does not yield. She has her own principle, that God does not allow it. But she knows also about the end and the wedge. Once conceded that innocent life may be taken for so very good a cause, there is no limit to the causes which will seem good enough to justify taking it. Millions of Jews exterminated in lethal chambers are a reminder that she is not being fanciful.

So in our present enquiry on marriage and divorce: the thin end of the wedge was adultery. It was argued, from a text in St. Matthew's Gospel, that Christ allowed divorce and remarriage on that one single ground: I do not thus interpret the text, but I can see how one might. So divorce came in, for adultery. A great deal of wedge has entered since that thin breach was made, and we have not seen the whole of it yet. Roughly speaking, anyone who wants a divorce can have it. He still has to ask for it, and may have to do a little legal manoeuvring for it. But he can get it. There is something else. The mere possibility of divorce helps marriage to fail. The average modern couple enter upon marriage, assuming it terminable, though they have no intention that theirs shall terminate. But successful marriage is not automatic. It has to be worked for, and there are trying moments, as we shall see in the next chapter, as indeed you can see in the life around you. There are difficulties from within—two imperfect personalities to be somehow adjusted; difficulties from outside —economic circumstance, the superior seductiveness of strangers. Marriage, like all other valuable human things, calls for strong efforts and strong resistances: and people who know that marriage is unbreakable, will make them: people who regard it as breakable, won't.

The principle of the end and the wedge has had a spectacular illustration in the matter of birth control. The thin end of the wedge was the wife who would certainly die if she had another baby: to oppose contraception for her made one feel like a brute. The wedge made its entry: and the widening was dazzling: till now a high school girl might feel socially inadequate without her contraceptive package. For everybody, married and unmarried, contraceptives seem to have taken the danger out of sex! One can indulge sexual desires irresponsibly, for "nothing can happen." With contraceptives, one feels, sex can be played with. But sex is never to be played with, it is too strong: and something is always happening in the depths of the psyche. The truth is that a healthy use of sex cannot co-exist with any deformation of the sexual act, there is too much possibility of frenzy in it; the institution of marriage cannot co-exist with divorce, for human indolence and waywardness will always take the line of least resistance. Any exception upon either abandons the principle, and nothing is left but the wreckage.

All this may seem fanciful to those who regard sex as a life all its own, not related to the rest of life, or as a private hobby with no effects upon the other elements of the individual's life or the life of society—a hobby like stamp-collecting, only more exciting. Such people tend, too, to the romantic notion that you only have to leave sex uncontrolled to get happiness. One wonders how either notion could survive adolescence. Maturity sees sex yielding less happiness today than it ever did, the framework of married life everywhere corroded, the children of broken homes growing into a national problem. Health for the individual and for society is not simply a question of the best distribution of material goods—pleasant work, pleasant home, economic sufficiency, sexual desire hollowing its own happy channels. All that is three-dimensional, and man has a strange fourth dimension—the sacred. Life must be sacred, sex must be sacred, marriage must be sacred. For all three there is no sure middle ground between sacredness and profanation. All three run too deep into the heart of reality for a decent respectability to be sufficient or even possible. We have already noted that what man does not reverence he will profane. He must re-learn reverence for life and for sex and for marriage. They can flourish only as sacrosanct.

(4)

In the last section I have talked exclusively of divorce and birth control; and indeed our presentation of marriage to the world concentrates so much on these that an outsider might be pardoned for thinking Christian marriage no more than an heroic refusal to get divorced, accompanied by a tight-lipped renunciation of contraceptives. But these two are diseases of marriage, comparable in the moral order to cancer and consumption in the material. Freedom from cancer and consumption does not mean that a body is healthy; freedom from divorce and birth control does not mean that a marriage is healthy. A body may be free from major diseases, yet unhealthy and devitalized: so may a marriage. To understand health, we must study health—the conditions in which a thing is most fully itself and most abounding in vitality. This study must always be primarily positive. The study of disease—even the recognition that it is disease—comes after.

To summarize all this, the love of husband and wife can be the magnificent thing it is meant to be only if both are living mentally in the real universe, a universe which exists solely because God wills it and in which each thing is healthily itself only by being as God wills it. Men must see what they are and where they are before they can see with real understanding, and not simply by blind obedience, how they should act. And save in relation to God they cannot see what they are and where they are, for save in relation to God they would not be at all. Once a man has this view of reality as a whole, he will scarcely need arguments against divorce and contraception; until he has it, he will not be convinced by them. This bringing in of God is not mere religiosity: it is the plain fact of things. It may seem vastly troublesome to teach men about God before dealing with their concrete problems, but the sooner we realize that the concrete problems cannot be solved without God, the better for everybody.

Endnotes

1. God teaches, through His Church, that there are two instances in which marriage, solidly contracted, may be broken. The first is when the marriage has not been consummated: for good reason, the Church can terminate it. And there is the situation envisaged by St. Paul (I Cor. vii. 15): two unbaptized people marry and later one of them is baptized: if the unbaptized one refuses to live with the baptized (or makes life together impossible), the baptized one may marry again.

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