POLYGAMY.
DR. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, is riding a hobby to death. For the last six years he has been arguing, teaching, and even preach- ing, that the putting away of extra wives, which the missionaries of Natal urge upon their converts, is not commanded by Christ or justi- fied by the Gospel, and that while it delays the progress of Chris- tianity from the natural repugnance which it creates, it is also in itself an immoral act. He now solemnly calls on Convocation, in a letter addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to give the subject "a calm and careful deliberation," and formally decide in favour of his view of the moral law. In other words, he desires that the Church of England should, after public and formal debate, decide that poly- gamy is not a malum in se, but a practice which, under particular circumstances, may be allowed to Christian men. The Church had, in our judgment, much better let the matter alone.
In the special case of the converts, sensible men will probably be inclined to agree with the Bishop, though some of his arguments are of the shallowest order. One which weighs very much with him—the hardship of compelling a man to put away his wife—seems to us almost without weight. The hardship is not a bit greater than, for example, the renunciation of caste which every Hindoo convert gives up, and the loss of which separates him from all his own relations, his mother and children included. To relax laws of this kind on the ground of personal hardship, is the most dangerous of practices. In almost all Asiatic countries one frightful hardship exists which is pleaded by the people themselves as a full justification of polygamy : the wo- man withers twenty years before the man begins to decay. An Asiatic girl, married at twelve, is at thirty, and often at twenty-five, a wrinkled scarecrow, incapable of child-bearing, and hideous to the eye. Is the Church to rule that in all such cases polygamy is lawful or expedient ? To many men the fact of childlessness is the most terrible of calamities. Henry the Eighth broke down a social orga- nization which had lasted centuries only to avert it. Napoleon sacri- ficed the wife of his youth, broke with the Revolution, and risked his popularity With his people uuder the same temptation. One mighty community, a tenth of the human race, bases its whole social system, from the descent of thrones to the smallest ceremony, upon the necessity of keeping the line intact, and pundits almost deny that heaven is possible to the man who dies childless. Is the Church to allow, as Hindooism does, that polygamy, in itself admitted to be an evil, is justified when it averts this hardship ? The argument proves too much, and should never have been advanced by a Bishop who would not admit that the command, "Leave all and follow me," was a "stumbling-block" in the way of conversion. The true argument lies in the wrong which the wives and children thus put away endure, and which could only be justified by a direct command. There cer- tainly is no such command in Scripture, the only sentence implying such a law—" let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband"—being at least as clearly directed against celibacy, and explicable by the text which, forbidding a minister to have more than one wife, seems to justify the practice among laymen. Even this idea of wrong, however, must not be pushed too far. Every people which permits polygamy—the Hindoo excepted—permits also divorce, and the wife is married subject to that liability. The fact that the cause of divorce is a change of faith does not increase the wrong she endures, though it may deepen the moral wrong which the husband, awakened to new responsibilities, does to his own con- science. A careful balance, however, between the wrong inflicted on individual families, and the evil caused by polygamy temporarily tolerated among Christians, will, we think, incline observers slightly towards the Bishop's side. Men, however devoted to literal inter- pretations, will not, we think, blame a missionary who, secure of his own conscience, tolerates polygamy among converts, or seeks to dis- turb the civil immunity which polygamy has always enjoyed in heathen countries governed by British law. The monstrous system called Koolinism, under which certain Indian Brahmins marry a score of wives and live with none of them, is not polygamy at all, but simply an arrangement subversive of ordinary morality, and open to legal action at the request of the people.
But while missionaries may be left free to their own interpretation of Scripture and sense of rectitude, we deprecate strongly any action by the English Church in favour of any such latitude. Polygamy, though not directly forbidden, is wholly foreign to the spirit and essence of Christian life, as well as to the unwritten revelation found in physiological laws. The Christian theory rests on the unity of the husband and wife, which polygamy at once destroys, while the practice, by introducing a permanent and irremediable cause of jealousy, breaks up the Home, and with it that form of civilization which is found to develop most fully the ordinary Christian virtues. By robbing the poorer members of the community of the wives who should have been theirs, it directly injures all whom it does not directly corrupt, while it lowers of necessity the whole tone of that system of sentiments which we in Europe call love. If we cared to offend the prudery which in England tolerates no plain speaking, except in police reports, we could produce strong physical arguments, and that without appealing to the very doubtful physiological ground popular among English travellers. They are very apt to affirm that a race given to polygamy degene- rates, forgetting that the Jews have been among the most enduring of races, and that while the Roman who hated polygamy has disap- peared, the Arab, who reduced it to system, retains an overflowing vitality. But there is one social fact patent to all men with eyes, who can recognize any society but that of the British Isles. Poly- gamy enslaves half the human race. It cannot be worked at all without sharp and stern laws pressed down on the women's necks. So strong is the influence of jealousy, so ineradicable the distrust of men conscious of divided affection, that there is, we believe, no com- munity on earth which allows polygamy and does not also concede to the husband the power of life and death. Nor, we believe, is that fact any result of barbarism, but of a just appreciation of the natural laws which make every evil a source of evils more nume- rous still. The example of the Mormons is nothing to the point. They punish adultery with death, and they were bred up in all the influences of Christianity and Western civilization. Any mea- sure, therefore, which tends to diminish the Western horror of poly- gamy is in itself, pro tanto, an injury to morals and civilization, and a resolution by the English Church affirming Dr. Colenso's proposal would be a most serious injury. The mass of mankind will never be restrained either by the considerations of civilization or expediency, nor will they believe that a thing wrong in itself can ever be right under certain exceptional circumstances. Consequently they will either treat the decision as wholly nugatory, or they will argue that adherence to one wife is merely a rule imposed by the civil law; that, for example, it would be morally right for a man to turn Mormon, and act on his principles, even before he had reached Utah. The mass of men are careless enough of restraint as it is, without anybody offer- ing them additional arguments in favour of relaxation. No ease of the special kind which appealed to Dr. Colenso can ever arise in England, and the missionaries had much better be left to deal with exceptional causes in their own lands, where even an occasional blunder on either side, however mischievous to the individual, can have no evil effect on society at large.
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