• Marriage questions in Modern Fiction, and other Essays. By

E. B. Chapman. London John Lane.

very troublesome to meet. Miss Chapman is fervently con- vinced that the stability of the social order depends upon the maintenance of the principle of permanence in marriage ; and all but one of the papers in her volume are directed to enforcing this principle. But she recognises only to protest against it the real ground upon which alone this principle can be maintained and enforced with authority ; that is to say, the belief that Christian marriage is an ordinance of God, miraculously sanctified and sanctifying, to those who use it reverently. Miss Chapman tells us a great many times that marriage is a sacrament ; but every time she tells us this she takes care to tell II8 also that the sanctity of the sacrament is not derived from any theological belief about it, or any mystical truth corresponding to a theological belief. A sacrament is a purely human matter ; and marriage is only a sacrament because it is the kind of union between a man and a woman which must commend itself to human beings who have come out of brutedom and reached a considerable height of spiritual development. In short, it is the kind of union which satisfies Miss Chapman's ideal, and therefore she wishes the principle of it to be maintained, and the whole world gradually educated up to it. In these days when many people who ought to know better are gravely questioning the morality of marriage, and advocating free love as the higher and the purer way, one hails with satisfaction any testimony—from a school or an individual—to the sound- ness of the old-fashioned morality. One is glad to learn, for instance, that a lady who writes in advanced magazines and lectures to moral reform unions, is strongly opposed to divorce. But beyond this, there is really very little satisfaction of a solid kind to be got out of Miss Chap- man's book. We fail altogether to see how her arguments can convince any one who is not convinced already ; while we fear that her very sympathetic appreciation of the aims of other idealists who, starting from the same

premises and postulates, have arrived at opposite conclu- 3ions, may carry some still hesitating readers over into 'the enemy's camp. For, much as Miss Chapman dreads the

increase of divorce, she appears to dread even more the in- iluenc,e of the one great power which has for nineteen hundred years supported the principle of the sanctity and the indis- solubility of marriage; and she never misses an opportunity of discrediting the Christian Church by attaching some slight- ing adjective or adverb to the term by which she designates it. She even goes the length of insinuating that it is the fact

of its having been specially supported and protected by the Church that has given the phrase, indissolubility of marriage,

"an ugly sound in modern ears. We associate indissolubility with superstition:and obscurantism, with the pretensions of clericalism and the unveracities of mysticism." On the other

hand, she quotes with great admiration the passage from the Purgatorio, in which souls expiating sins of unchastity are made to proclaim the names of men and matrons who have lived, "come virtute e matrimonio imponne [as virtue and mar-

riage ordain]." Bat having done so, she distinguishes very elaborately between Dante's conception of marriage and that of the Church to which Dante belonged :-

"With Dante the word marriage is used with a gravity, a solemnity, a religious awe, which the modern world does not attach to it ; it is used as a lofty synonym for the loftiest mortal thing known to him—virtue ; it is used as the symbol of an immutable, indefectible, heaven-descended ordinance, at which it is no more possible for men to cavil than at virtue itself. Matrinwnio ' is the equal and assessor of Virtute; ' the two words are breathed together, as a devout soul in those ages of faith might have breathed together in a prayer the words Church, Religion, God. Nor is Dante here merely the con- ventional mouthpiece of the orthodox Catholic view of marriage. Dante is never one of the crowd, by whom at all times and in all places things sacramental are not so regarded except in a formal, external, and perfunctory sense. He speaks, not as the bigot or precisian—he is never either—but as one of the elect, who know intuitively when they are upon holy ground and bow the knee and worship ; whose piercing spiritual insight goes deep down to the heart of things, and who distinguish between conventions and realities as the husbandman between the tares and the wheat. It was by virtue of this penetrating vision, and not merely in obedience to the dictates of his Church, that marriage, for Dante, was a sacrament, that fidelity to it was a paramount duty, that disloyalty to it, in himself or others, was a heinous sin."

That was, of course, Dante's view of marriage; as also of course it was the view of the medimval Church, and as, of course (though Miss Chapman appears to be ignorant of the fact), it is the view of thousands of simple souls—as well as of hundreds of rare spirits—in the present day. Dante was undoubtedly a poet of great spiritual insight and a thinker of stern, unflinching intellect. And he was also a medizeval Catholic. But it does not follow that because as poet and thinker he did not reject the sacramental faith of the Catholic Church, he held it in a sense altogether different from, and superior to, that in which it was held by other devout Catholics of his day, and 18 still held by Catholics—Roman and Anglican —in our own day ; and, we may add (with a slight difference of phrase), by many Christians who object to calling themselves Catholics, or marriage a sacrament, but who have no doubt that the sanctity of "holy matrimony" rests upon the divine authority of the ordinance and the divine blessing attending it. Miss Chapman, however, is bent upon making the most of Dante's inspiration, and the least of fast of the Church in the bosom of which his genius was nursed ; and so she imputes the perception of the great truth of the sacramental nature of marriage, and its consequent indissolu- bility, to superior spiritual insight in the one case, and to obscurantism and the "unveracities of mysticism" in the other. We fear that she would have a hard task to prove Dante free from mysticism, or to separate his conception of a sacratnent from the theological ideas which, for her, vitiate its vale in the case of the Churches. When Miss Chapman comes to the discussion of Milton's doctrine of divorce, she is divided between admiration of his high ideal of the matrimonial union as "a human society," and irritation with his impatience of the obligation to make some sacrifice of personal happiness and comfort for the sanctity of the principle involved ; and she recognises that the seventeenth-century Pnritan arrived at an attitude towards marriage which was exactly that of the godless revolutionist of modern times :—

"Entire freedom from the religious restrictions of the past ; liberty to be practieally a law unto oneself in this, as in other matters ; emancipation from everything irksome, everything galling, everything wearisome in marriage—this is Milton's aim, and this is, speaking generally, the aim of the modern world."

And yet, she remarks, of Milton also-

" Marriage is a sacrament ; marriage is a spiritual union with a physical sequel' ; marriage is a • human society' ; Milton is for ever repeating it with the untiring persistency of unalterable conviction. If he had but been able to add, as it will be shown that he could have added without paradox, marriage is permanent and indissoluble,' his confession of faith might have been ours, so clear is it, so loftily resolute in its rejection of what is gross, while adhering firmly to what is natural."

What Miss Chapman fails to see is that, to the rationalising seventeenth-century Puritan, marriage was a sacrament only in the impotent human sense in which Miss Chapman herself uses the word ; not in the superhuman sense of intrinsic potency it carries in the mouth of Dante and the Catholic Church; and that, in this sense, in which she and other literary ladies of little or no theological faith are so fond of using it to-day, it is a very flimsy bulwark to raise against the passionate personal interests that are thrown into rebellion every time a marriage, contracted for "mutual comfort," results in galling bondage. The odd thing is, not that Milton arrived at the same position as the modern revolutionists, but that

Miss Chapman does not arrive at it—for logically her position is their's—though she clings sentimentally to the position

that pleases her taste.

The essay of most interest in the collection is undoubtedly the first, in which the literature of the revolt against marriage is reviewed with more discrimination than is usually brought to bear upon it. Miss Chapman avoids wholesale judgments, and distinguishes very justly between the assailants of marriage who are prompted by sheer

lawlessness and desire for increased. opportunity of personal indulgence, and those who are drawn into the battle by

mistaken idealism. People of common-sense and decent feeling, who know anything of the literature she discusses, will thank her heartily for her condemnation of its grosser developments ; and the same class of readers will appreciate the clearness and vigour of her declaration of faith in the pre- face, to which she gives the title of " Religio Femime." In the odd little paper on "The Disparagement of Women in Literature," one feels the presence of a mind to which the gift of humour has been denied. We quite understand Miss Chapman's objec- tion to Mr. Thomas Hardy's handling of women's characters. But when she quarrels with Shakespeare, we recognise that she goes beyond our depth. Upon St. Paul also she is a little hard.

But then Miss Chapman, though she says "it is better not

to labour the question of abstract equality between the sexes," is evidently satisfied that such equality exists. Though, like all writers who rest their claim for consideration towards women upon the assumption of natural equality with men, she makes no attempt to explain how it has come about that in all barbarous countries, as well as under all non-Christian civilisations, women have been relegated to a condition of absolute inferiority, and that it is only where Christianity has transformed civilisation and introduced principles that restrain the stronger in the interest of the weaker, that it has been possible even to talk about that "fair field and no favour" which so man j men are now quite ready to agree shall be artificially created for women. For our part, we do not yet see any reason why St. Paul's exhortations to women to submit themselves to their husbands should be left out when the Epistles are read en famine. But on the other band, neither do we see any reason why a woman should not read family prayers in England to - day, though nineteen hundred years ago St. Paul would not suffer a woman to teach in Palestine. With us Christianity has very largely transformed the world since Paul wrote. But Miss Chapman makes a mistake when she speaks of Jesus having transformed it nineteen hundred years eget, He only introduced the principle that was to transform it; jand it would have been very imprudent for women to begin at puce to behave as if the transformation had been sworn- /In conclusion, we would say that our objection to the book —and we do dislike it as a whole, though we sympathise with many sentiments expressed in it—is that it discusses from a mistaken and untenable position, questions which have now reached a point in public interest at which further dis- cussion does harm, unless it is conducted upon principles of a much stricter logic than Miss Chapman proves herself to be mistress of.