Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/61

 concubinage, or polygamy, or polyandry, confined within certain bounds. Among us wholesale dissoluteness finds place: concubinage, polygamy, and polyandry, free from all limitations, and concealed by the pretence of monogamy.

For no better reason than because the clergy, for money, perform certain ceremonies (called marriage services) over a certain number of those who unite, people in our society naïvely or hypocritically imagine that we are a monogamous people.

There never was, or could be, such a thing as Christian marriage, any more than Christian worship, Christian teachers and Fathers of the Church, Christian pro-