Our marriage system is made up of two absolutely different
elements which cannot blend. On the one hand, it is the manifestation
of our deepest and most volcanic impulses. On the other hand, it is an
elaborate web of regulations--legal, ecclesiastical, economic--which is
to-day quite out of relation to our impulses. On the one hand, it is a
force which springs from within; on the other hand, it is a force which
presses on us from without.[1] One says broadly that these two elements
of marriage, as we understand it, are out of relation to each other.
But there is an important saving qualification to be made. The inner
impulse is not without law, and the external pressure is not without an
ultimate basis of nature. That is to say, that under free and natural
conditions the inner impulse tends to develop itself, not licentiously
but with its own order and restraints, while, on the other hand, our
inherited regulations are largely the tradition of ancient attempts to
fix and register that natural order and restraint. The disharmony comes
in with the fact that our regulations are traditional and ancient, not
our own attempts to fix and register the natural order but inextricably
mixed up with elements that are entirely alien to our civilised habits
of life. Whatever our attitude towards mediaeval Canon Law may
be--whether reverence or indifference or disgust--it yet holds us and
is ingrained into our marriage system to-day. Canon Law was a good and
vital thing under the conditions which produced it.
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