AND ANOTHER THING
When the honourable estate of marriage is underestimated by dishonourable men
PAUL JOHNSON
Last weekend I attended one of the most delightful and moving weddings I can remember. The day was delicious, as only an English June can be: blue sky, feathery clouds and, as the old wives say, 'just enough wind to lift the bride's veil'. It was a village wedding and we walked across the fields to the hoary old church, the very one which Coleridge used as the setting for his Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The bride was of ravishing beauty, which gave the event transcendency. There were enchanting child bridesmaids, excited but decorous, as is proper, and a tiny, satiny page boy, scarcely able to toddle, but appropriately naughty. The locality was present in all its finery, to witness, to sing lustily 'Jerusalem' and 'The King of Love My Shepherd Is', and to weep happily — my wife Marigold, as is her wont, was in tears the second she saw the elderly lemon-and-black Rolls- Royce.
The Anglican marriage service is a noble work of prose, and when it is vigorously read and solemnly conducted, it is awe- some. It does not mince its words. It refers to 'carnal lusts' and 'brute beasts' and the `avoidance of fornication'. It speaks of obe- dience, poverty, sickness and death. It bids the Man and the Woman — no slippery, euphemistic nonsense about 'partners' to speak the truth about their love and union, 'as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed'. Above all, it calls mar- riage 'holy', 'an honourable estate', some- thing which is sanctified and thereby raised above the animal passions. At a time when marriage is being attacked on all sides, when a corrupt society and a wicked gov- ernment are doing their best to obliterate the legal, moral and social distinctions between lawful marriage and mere concu- binage, it is right to be reminded that a consecrated union is the essence of honour, a central and indispensable underpinning of our Judaeo-Christian civilisation, a sacral barrier which keeps the barbarians out of our cultural citadel.
Moreover, the salient point of marriage is its permanency. To make marriage irre- vocable was one of the great changes Jesus Christ, God's son, made in the ancient Jew- ish law, which still reflected in this instance the paganism of its primitive origins. Last Saturday, I was glad to see the priest, in pronouncing the couple man and wife, raise their joined hands high and proclaim with great emphasis, 'Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.' Christ's words could not be plainer, which makes it all the more surprising — and hor- rifying — that not only Anglican bishops but Catholic ones, and a cardinal in all his flaming scarlet, have given their impri- matur to the Lord Chancellor's cheap-and- easy, no-fault divorce Act, the most destructive and deliberate attack on the institution of marriage since Henry VIII, in his lust for Anne Boleyn, forced Parliament to declare his lawful marriage null.
At the wedding I witnessed last weekend, we heard some notable texts in defence of the permanency which marriage should promote, including a striking passage from Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present. There is irony in Carlyle's words, for it is, and was at the time, no secret that his own marriage to Jane Welsh was vertiginous. An acquain- tance remarked, 'What a pity those two ever got married', and was answered, 'No, it is a blessing, because by doing so they ensured that only two people would be mis- erable, instead of four.'
But the Carlyles stuck it out until death parted them — how courageously and obstinately the marvellous letters they exchanged reveal. They believed in mar- riage and permanency and civilisation, and they saw the connection between the three. They were awful — but they knew how, in the last resort, to put up with each other. Marriage is a problem for everyone, and needs to be worked at, like all worthwhile things. It is exceedingly difficult for two people to live intimately together for decades on end, and the experience is marked by rows, sulks, silences, betrayals, falsehoods, bitter accusations, meanness and raking up of ancient wrongs. These pit- falls have to be bridged, as St Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, another fine text read out last weekend, by putting on the garments of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience and forbear- ance. One must be forgiving, says St Paul. Above all, the sparks of love must be kept alive and glowing in the ashes, and the coals of fresh affection thrown on from time to time to keep the flames high, so that children, and grandchildren, can warm their hands at the enduring union. All this takes hard work, and sometimes gritting of teeth, renunciation of grievances, surren- ders of pride and humble admission of error. A long-enduring marriage is held together by countless `Sorrys'. It is a saga of heroism, a continual war-and-peace. But the wounds heal, and are soon forgotten, and the saga continues, growing stronger with each happily surmounted episode, adding to its permanence like the annual growth rings on a sturdy tree. Divorce is a defeat, a surrender, an act of cowardice, a cop-out. It is a dishonourable estate, a shameful thing.
It is also a betrayal of society, an assault on the community. Divorce makes the lawyers rich but it impoverishes their clients. Much more than unemployment, it is the prime cause of poverty in Britain today, especially among women and chil- dren. And, with its remorseless increase, we are beginning to discover its real cost to the country. This month the wretched John Gummer, Environment Secretary, admitted that, though the country's population is almost static, we are going to need 4.4 mil- lion extra houses over the next 20 years. The reason for this is the inexorable growth of the single-person household, the grim consequence of quick, cheap and easy divorce. Because the law no longer forces people to work at their marriages — indeed positively incites them to break freely entered pledges — the virgin fields of Eng- land will be subjected to wholesale rape by the speculative builders. Counties like Hampshire and Berkshire, rural jewels which lie at the very heart of our southern countryside, will be ruthlessly invaded by new estates, and ancient villages turned into towns. Local councils will be unable to stop this spoliation because Gummer, a member of the government which forced no-fault divorce through a reluctant Parlia- ment, has the power to overrule them. Here is another instance of how the undermining of marriage, that honourable estate, opens the gates to barbarism. But in this grim world a village wedding, with its simple ideals and its hopeful pledges and its sympathetic tears of joy, is still a whole- some delight, to be treasured while it lasts.
Previous page
