Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/475

Rh The ground for this definiteness is not difficult to discover. Marriage, both in its lower and its higher aspects, is the basis of family unity. Family life is the most sacred of all relations outside of the relation between God and man. It is not to be violated even in look and thought. Adultery may be committed even when lust never passes beyond the licentious glance. In the same proportion as the natural sanctity of marriage is injured, in the same proportion is the nature of man outraged and ideal fraternity broken. To dishonor this first of human relationships is to loosen the bonds of society, to lower present social ideals, to do injury to the essential nature of both the man and the woman. It was, therefore, not in the spirit of a purist or a fanatic that Jesus thus put checks upon divorce, but in that of the ethical and social philosopher. Nor—and this is a remarkable thing—is there a trace of the current formal conception that the husband had any property rights in his wife. On the contrary, as will presently appear, Jesus, to a surprising degree, anticipated today's belief in the equality of the sexes. It was this as well as the underlying principles of his ideal society that led him in the face of popular opinion thus to formulate these strict statutes. Modern sentiment, like the legislation and the sentiment of the professional teachers of his day, is opposed to such severity in the morals of matrimony. Marriage is assuming much more the character of a legal status than of a natural union. Its continuance is increasingly believed to be dependent upon the desires of the parties concerned and the decision of the courts. So far as mere legal separation of unequally or ill-matched persons is concerned, the ideal described by Jesus would not antagonize this modern tendency, but the general consent of past and present moral teachers and statesmen agrees with his noble rejection of the admissibility of the scandalous travesties of life's most sacred union, to which nowadays these separations generally lead. We are not now concerned with the practicability of such an ideal; it may be too