Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 45:177 (Jan 1888)
Article: Some Relations Of Divorce To Social Morality
Author: Alexander R. Merriam

BSac 45:177 (Jan 1888) p. 32

Some Relations Of Divorce To Social Morality

Rev. Alexander R. Merriam

There is growing up in our communities a direct foe of the home. The Nation is becoming gradually aroused to the danger. I refer to the social and legal abuses of the great sexual bond of marriage. With incidental reference to other disintegrating forces, I shall ask your particular attention to the subject of Divorce.

A few years ago, Renan said in Paris, “Nature cares nothing for the ideas of the New Testament as to the family.” “Yes,” replied Matthew Arnold, when in America, “It may be that Nature cares nothing for these ideas, but Human Nature cares a great deal,” and “Human nature is structurally religious and domestic,” adds an eminent American, “and religion and home can never be successfully antagonized, nor be safely ignored.”

I am obliged in the limits of this paper to confine myself chiefly to one of three lines of thought: The Historical, or the Exegetical, or the Cotemporary problem.

I. It would be interesting and is important, in view of the growth of the evolution philosophy, to discuss under the historical phase of our subject the different theories as to the origin of the family, represented by Sir Henry Maine and his school on the one side, in defence of the monogamic origin, and Sir John Lubbock and his school on the other, suggesting promiscuity as the early type. But I must omit all of this most interesting phase of our subject, and say nothing about the teachings of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman history

BSac 45:177 (Jan 1888) p. 33

on our theme, in order to get down to our own cotemporary problem. Suffer, however, a few teachings of the historical survey. A study of the family historically shows that, whatever may have been the habits of prehistoric races, or are the customs of savage tribes to-day, at the dawn of verifiable history the family life existed in the simple bond of monogamy. Again, we see that the earliest conception of marriage in all history is religious, and yet that the later Roman idea of contract, and the Greek idea of individual freedom, opened the way to unlimited grounds for separation, or to an almost universal incontinence. Incidentally we see that the voluntary or legal severing of the marriage bond on easy terms may co-exist, and in historic fact did co-exist in Greece and Rome, with a great increase of licentiousness. We discover, moreover, that, for whatever causes, the family, both in its civil and religious aspects, was nearer utter destruction in the days of the later Roman republic and early empire than before or since in the history of civilized society. We may add one inference more which may be of value in our study, that the material and intellectual gran...