THE POLYGAMY OF HEATHEN CONVERTS.
THE subject which the Bishops discussed in conference on Wednesday is one on which it is impossible even to conceive a satisfactory decision. Christian principles of both action and feeling are utterly incongruous with polygamy in any shape, and yet they are, we believe, still more incongruous with that arbitrary dissolution of domestic ties voluntarily undertaken before conversion to Christianity, which some Christian missionaries earnestly advocate. The dilemma is like that of a man who, having undertaken, in consideration of advantages conferred upon him by one in whom he had subsequently lost all confidence, to find the latter large pecuniary means, should, after receiving and appropriating what he had bargained for, and so dealt with it that he could not give it back, declare himself pricked in his conscience by -the obligation under which he lay to fulfil his share of the contract, on the ground that he ought not to give the creditor whom he had learned to condemn or despise, large powers of doing mischief. Yet to break his contract after receiving the equivalent, would, in such a case, clearly be a course morally worse than to fulfil it in spite of the risk of becoming thereby the source of much evil. It is the same with heathen contracts of marriage,—of course, when we speak of marriage, we do not mean to include concubinage,—honestly entered into before Christian teaching had made such marriages impossible. There is and must be a choice of evils. Either the convert must break arbitrarily with one or more of his wives, and throw them back upon the world in the dishonoured condition of wives who had been repudiated in favour of one specially honoured by her husband; or he must continue to live in relations which are condemned by the spirit as well as by the words of Christ, and which no Christian could by any possi- bility be permitted by the Church to enter into after embracing Christianity, If the first alternative were taken, there must be sanction, nay, authority given by the Christian Church to acts of gross injustice, and probably of gross cruelty, towards the unfortunate wives who had been married before there was any thought of wrong in polygamy, and who would have to be arbi- trarily selected for repudiation; if the second alternative were adopted, there must be sanction, nay, authority given by the -Church to the temporary continuance of an institution which .Christianity inevitably treats as in principle,—i.e., from the Christian point of view,—licentious and debasing. There is practically the choice between a deliberate breach of con- tract by the Christian convert which must be both unjust and cruel in multitudes of cases, on the one hand, and a deliberate continuance for years, it may not unfreq-aently be for the remainder of a man's term on earth, under conditions of life which the Church properly regards with the utmost moral repugnance, and peremptorily forbids to all who are converted before they have contracted marriage with more than one wife.
It is a very serious and difficult dilemma ; but we hold with the view which appears to be attributed on some authority to the Bishop of London, that the Church has no right to dis- solve or attempt to dissolve arbitrarily, genuine marriages contracted honestly under heathen sanctions, on the ground that had the husband been a Christian before they were entered upon, the Church must have forbidden them. There are very many engagements which it would be wrong to take afresh under the guidance of an enlightened conscience, which it would be still more wrong to break after they were taken and could no longer be taken back, only because it had been discovered that if the fresh light which had been shed upon them by new teaching had been earlier forthcoming, they would never have been taken at all. A Christian convert has often, for instance, found out that had he sooner become a Christian, he would have married a very different wife from the wife he did marry; but he is not on that plea permitted to put away the wife who perhaps stands in the way, or appears at all events to stand in the way, of his further progress in the Christian life. And what is true of a monogamic marriage that proves to be dangerous to the Christian life of the convert, is true also of polygamk marriages, which can no longer be annulled without cruel injustice to the wives and often even to the children, who would no longer be permitted to live in the household to which by right they belonged. It is obvious that if the Church is to set her face against all converts who do not repudiate all but one of their wives, she will have immense difficulty in selecting the one wife who is not to be repudiated, since in a tribe where polygamy is the acknowledged right of husbands, why should the wife who happens to be the first selected, and who is no more regarded by that tribe as a true wife than the last selected, be preferred to the others ? To say nothing of the fact that the husband would often wish to keep the latest and newest choice, and might fight very hard against being tied exclusively to the one who had grown old with him, there would be the greatest possible difficulty in securing for the wife selected that exclusive affection, which ought to be the wife's right, for she would of course be one of several, all but one of whom must be objects of profound and just pity, and sometimes, perhaps, of devoted love. The situation of a Christianised husband with a plurality of wives must be admitted to be one of the greatest possible moral complexity ; but we fail to see how it can be properly dealt with by lacerating the heart of a polygamist, who was quite innocent of wrong-doing when he became a polygamist, in a very cruel fashion, only to make him feel that he is breaking faith with one and keeping faith with another, though he might just as legitimately have put the dishonoured wife in the place of the honoured wife, had the necessarily arbitrary rule adopted by the Church, been determined differently. And when we consider that in the early period of the Jewish Church,— out of which the Christian Church sprang,—polygamy was a perfectly regular institution, it seems capricious to insist that heathens, with probably much less of hereditary civilisation to boast of than the Jews of the patriarchal times, should be compelled to choose between losing all claim to Christian teaching or sympathy, and mutilating domestic ties which they had already formed, though the early Jewish Church would have admitted their sacredness as frankly as it admitted Jacob's marriage to both Leah and Rachel.
It must, of course, be freely admitted that no converted family living in polygamy can live after the perfect Christian model ; but then, it is equally true that no converted family from which one or more wives had been cruelly and arbitrarily dismissed could live after the perfect Christian model. There must be in either case the utmost difficulty in carrying the truly Christian spirit into the life of such a family. There must be pangs and jealousies, and perhaps feelings of self- reproach and remorse, on either alternative alike. But while in the case of permitting the polygamy so far as it had been honestly accepted before the conversion, there would at least be no consciousness of broken faith and deliberate cruelty,—on the other alternative, that of repudiating all wives but one, feelings of this kind must disturb largely the life of the contracted household, while in all probability the new purity sought for would not be secured, and might even be more fatally sacrificed than it would be if no attempt had been made to root up ties formed before the conversion had taken place. Marriage cannot be cancelled without the certainty of great cruelty to most of the repudiated wives, the probability of considerable cruelty to some of the repudiating husbands, and the danger of a conflict of subsequent emotions which is almost sure to be fatal to the peace of the contracted house. It is true, of course, that a polygamic marriage cannot be sanctioned in a convert without serious dangers of another kind. But serious as these are, they are not, we think, so serious as those which arise out of violence done to natural ties with their roots in the past, and that, too, a past not open to any moral censure at the time when it was not the past but the present. Christian teaching must, of course, treat true marriage as impossible except between one man and one woman; but where the tie had already been formed between one man and more than one woman, before the Christian teaching was heard, it seems to us that Christ would not have ordered the rending of the family asunder by some capricious and artificial decree, but would have insisted only that every step to be taken subsequently, should be taken towards the higher and purer ideal. Is not this a case where the course which on the surface seems to make most for the purer ideal, would, in fact, make that purer ideal odious and justly repulsive?
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