Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/505

Rh magistrate as a minister of the retribution ordained by that justice as "tbe other half of crime," these things have well-nigh died out from the popular mind, as in place of the old spiritual principles of ethics, materialism refers us to natural history.

If law, with penal sanctions, be the bond of civil society, the family is certainly its foundation. But the family depends upon marriage. Now marriage, as it exists in Europe, is mainly the creation of spiritualism embodied in Christianity. Wordsworth gave utterance to no mere poetical fancy, but to the exact truth, when he wrote of "pure religion breathing household laws." What will become of marriage, and of that virtue of chastity of which it is the guardian, if we are to be governed by purely physical canons? In a recent work I have pointed out what, as a matter of fact, was the effect upon matrimony of the materialism dominant in France during the second half of the last century. I may here note how the legislators of the first French Republic dealt with it. The National Convention reduced it to a civil contract terminable, under circumstances, by the decree of a secular tribunal. As a fitting pendant to this enactment, the law of the 12th of Brumaire, year II of the Republic, placed natural children upon a footing of almost complete equality with children born in wedlock. Cambacérès, who acted as the rapporteur of the measure, would, indeed, have put them upon a completely equal footing. "The existing differences," he urged, "are the result of pride and superstition; they are ignominious and contrary to justice." The materialists who now sit in the seat of those sages are bent upon continuing and completing their work. The recent law on divorce is but a beginning, quite insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of the bolder spirits who pant for the entire abolition of marriage upon the ground that it is "the tomb of love, and the chief cause of stupidity (abêtissement) and ugliness (enlaidissement), in the human race." I suppose it must be conceded that stupidity and ugliness are the rule, rather than the exception, in the human race. But I have never been able to follow the reasoning which professes to find the source of these evils in matrimony, and their remedy in sexual promiscuity. Certain it is, however, that every school of materialism tends to the substitution of ephemeral connections, of what Mr.John Morley calls, after Rousseau, "marriage according to the truth of nature" —it is usually known as concubinage—for permanent and indissoluble wedlock, a "servitude" for which no sanction is found in physical science. "The moral and legal rule of marriage will be changed," M.Renan lately prophesied to the well-pleased students gathered around him at the Grand-Véfour; "the old Roman and Christian law will one day seem too exclusive, too narrow." And evidently M.Renan thinks that day of redemption drawing nigh.