impracticable, and cannot be properly discharged without the permanence of the family. We all know the sad calamity it is to the children when the Christian father or Christian mother is taken from them by death while they are yet young; and the still more distressing calamity when both are removed, and the children are made complete orphans and thrown on the care of strangers. Yet the separation by divorce a vinculo of the parents is a greater calamity still, and leaves the children worse off than simple orphans. Divorce breaks up the family as effectually as death; and parents separated by divorce are as incapable of bringing up their children as if they were actually dead.

The advocates of free-love are aware of this, and consequently contemplate measures, which will either prevent children from being born, or, if by some mischance they happen to be born, that will relieve the parents of all care of them:-the state must provide nurses for them, and provide for their bringing up and maintenance till they are able to do for themselves, somewhat on the plan recommended by Plato in his "Republic." Our women's rights women complain bitterly of the burden of childbearing, and of the woman's being obliged to spend the best years of her life in the drudgery of household cares, and of bringing up a whole brood of children. It is masculine tyranny that dooms her to it, from which woman suffrage and eligibility would soon emancipate her. They forget that it was to this she was doomed by a higher Power than that of man. It is the original penalty pronounced upon her for suffering herself to be seduced by the serpent, and for seducing her husband. In vain does she struggle against the irreversible laws of God:-" To the woman he said, I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have dominion over thee."

The evil of the doctrine that the marriage tie is dissoluble, does not end here. The admitted fact that it is dissoluble, has a very deleterious effect on both parents and children even when no actual dissolution takes place. Knowing that the marriage may be dissolved, that it is not necessarily for life, the husband and wife are indisposed to make the best of an ill-assorted marriage, and refuse to make those mutual concessions to each other's infirmities of temper, so necessary to harmonious union between them. They are rather disposed to exaggerate them into causes of real alienation. Each

becomes more irritated at the other, and petty faults, which should be overlooked or forgotten as soon as committed, are magnified by being brooded over, into unpardonable offences, and the marriage becomes a source of constant irritation, discord, and wretchedness; whereas, if from the first it had been understood and felt that the union is absolutely indissoluble save by death, the parties would have studied to adjust themselves to each other, to cultivate habits of mutual forbearance, and taken care not to magnify, nor to dwell on such little disagreements as may, and are almost certain from time to time to arise between parties not perfect or free from human passion and frailty. The wife yields to the husband without a murmur, even when he is unreasonably exacting; and the husband shows himself indulgent, even to the whims and caprices of his wife. So the union is made the best of, the mutual forbearance ripens into mutual love, and makes the parties, both for their own sake and the sake of their children, dread nothing so much as a separation.

But the discord between the parents, the lack of mutual respect of husband and wife, which we encounter in most non-Catholic families when we are permitted to see behind the curtain, and which is greater in proportion to the facility with which divorces can be obtained, has a terrible effect in destroying filial respect, filial love, and filial obedience. Children are keen-sighted; and the father cannot fail to honor the wife and the mother, or the wife and the mother to respect and obey the husband and the father, without their seeing it. "Young America" is, in great measure, the offspring of American democracy, which asserts the largest liberty, and renders strict family government, as well as efficient civil government, impracticable. "Is not this a free country?" said a boy some dozen years old to his father who had just flogged him. "Yes, young saucebox." "Then by what right do you flog me?" This spirit of license and insubordination penetrates the family, infests the whole community, infects the very atmosphere we breathe, and shows itself in the children of foreign parents brought up here not less, and, perhaps, in some instances, even more than in the children of those who 66 are to the manner born." It is to this same spirit, the democratic spirit of the country, and even of the age, that we must ascribe the degradation of the family, and the tendency to deprive marriage of its sacramental character, to facilitate divorces, and to favor

free-love. Divorce reacts on the children, and destroys to a fearful extent, their love and reverence for their parents. The insubordination of the wife shows itself in the insubordination of the child, and the insubordination of children to their parents produces insubordination to law,-disrespect and disobedience alike to the spiritual and civil chiefs of society. There is no country in the world where the natural results and logical tendencies of all the false notions and theories of the age, which the world owes to the modern apostasy from the Catholic Church, can be so advantageously studied as in our own. This is because these tendencies are less restrained here than elsewhere, and are freer to run their natural course and reach their natural results. But it is not in the more aristocratic sects, like the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, and perhaps the Methodist, who pertain in part to the past, but in the plebeian, subterranean, and out-of-the-way sects. Familiarity with these sects enables one to see, what at first sight is not apparent,—that the more aristocratic and conservative sects adopt the same principle, and follow, though more slowly and timidly, the same tendency that we mark in these plebeian and radical sects, condemned for their wildness, extravagance, follies, and absurdities, not to say blasphemies, by their own brethren. All are moving in the same direction, and animated by the same spirit, and are sure in time, if not arrested in their course, to reach the same result. The reformer who asserted the dissolubility of marriage, and made sentimental love its basis, asserted the seminal principle of free-love. He who contends for political equality, asserts in principle social equality, and has no logical stopping-place this side of communism: a community of goods and a community of wives. This is seen here better than elsewhere.

The fact is that in non-Catholic communities we find a reproduction, more or less complete, of ancient Greek and Roman paganism. Perhaps the corruption and degradation of the family is not yet as universal as under ancient civilized paganism, and may even differ somewhat in form; but we have found no abomination in heathenism that we cannot match in non-Catholic societies, and even in our own free and enlightened country, down to open and undeniable demon or devil-worship. Satan reigns in all apostate societies, and only varies his practices according to the temper of individuals and the times. In rejecting the patriarchal religion, the gentiles fell back on nature; in rejecting the

Catholic Church, and treating the pope as an usurper, as Antichrist, and making war against him and whatever is catholic, universal, and immutable, modern societies have done the same; but, as we have already said, neither individuals nor society can stand on nature alone, for nature has not its reason in itself, and does not and cannot, without the supernatural, suffice for nature. If men and nations do not rise above the natural virtues, they are sure to fall below them. He who casts off the authority of God inevitably becomes captive to Satan. The classics say many beautiful things of nature, but paganism is the practical commentary on their fine sayings; and its vices, its immoralities, its dissoluteness, superstitions, crimes, impurities, cruelties, and abominations are the practical and unanswerable refutation of the theory of the sufficiency of nature. It is the practical result in all ages and nations of the folly or madness of what is called rationalism, or of the effort to base religion and morality on nature alone.

The only possible way to restore and preserve the family in its purity and integrity, is to return to the Catholic idea of marriage, without which there is no family. In this most Protestant nation, which has departed further from the Catholic ideal than any other modern nation, the family has disappeared, or is rapidly disappearing, and American society is rapidly becoming, has wellnigh become, an aggregation, not of families, but of individuals. Marriage of a sort may be retained in name, but, save with our Catholic population, it is deprived of sanctity, unity, and indissolubility; and even our Catholic population find by experience that "evil communications corrupt good morals." But let us not deceive ourselves: Catholic marriage is impracticable, impossible even, in a non-Catholic society, as is evident from the fact that no non-Catholic community retains it. A return to it as an isolated reform would not rehabilitate the family; it would be like sewing a piece of new cloth on an old garment. Catholic marriage is interwoven with the whole Catholic system, and cannot be isolated from it, or observed in its purity and integrity without the Catholic faith, Catholic training and discipline, or without the gracious aids the Catholic Church supplies to her faithful children, and to none others.

To restore the Catholic family based on Catholic marriage, it is necessary for our non-Catholic societies to return to the bosom of the Catholic Church; in plain words, to be recon

VOL. XIII-35

verted to Christianity, from which they have virtually, if not formally apostatized. Catholic marriage cannot be reëstablished by secular legislation, nor grafted on Protestantism or infidelity. It can be restored only by a sincere and hearty return to the church, to the whole Catholic system, from the pope down to the holy-water pot; for Catholicity is a whole and all its parts hang together and depend on one another. Break it into fragments, as does paganism, as does Protestantism, and you lose its life which is in its unity and integrity, and not one of its fragments has any life or life-giving power. Hence the condemnation of all heresy and schism.

Society depends on the family, the family on Christian, that is to say, Catholic marriage, as the excellent Abbé Riche amply proves; and Catholic marriage depends on Catholic faith and discipline, together with the grace of the sacraments. This brings us back to what the Review has always insisted on that it is only by a return and filial submission to the church that the wounds of modern society can be healed. The modern world has deserted the Rock of salvation, abandoned the Fountain of living and life-giving waters, and the darkness and abominations of paganism resume their ancient sway. It is paganism that spreads over the land,—the paganism, polished and refined, of the classics, it may be, but none the less paganism for that. It is paganism even in nominally Christian lands, that the Christian missionary encounters and must once more vanquish. There are, doubtless, millions of good Catholics yet in the world, but the ruling classes of the several nations are as pagan as they were in the time of the apostles, and more difficult to convert. Not heresy alone, but paganism, the Christian must now war against.