MATERIALISM AND MORALITY. 485 



magistrate as a minister of the retribution ordained by that justice as 

 "the other half of crime," these things have well-nigh died out from 

 the popular mind, as in place of the old spiritual principles of ethics, 

 materialism refers us to natural history. 



If law, with penal sanctions, be the bond of civil society, the 

 family is certainly its foundation. But the family depends upon mar- 

 riage. Now marriage, as it exists in Europe, is mainly the creation of 

 spiritualism embodied in Christianity. Wordsworth gave utterance to 

 no mere poetical fancy, but to the exact truth, when he wrote of " pure 

 religion breathing household laws." What will become of marriage, 

 and of that virtue of chastity of which it is the guardian, if we are to be 

 governed by purely physical canons ? In a recent work I have pointed 

 out what, as a matter of fact, was the effect upon matrimony of the 

 materialism dominant in France during the second half of the last cent- 

 ury.* I may here note how the legislators of the first French Repub- 

 lic dealt with it. The National Convention reduced it to a civil con- 

 tract terminable, under circumstances, by the decree of a secular tribu- 

 nal. As a fitting pendant to this enactment, the law of the 12th of 

 Brumaire, year II of the Republic, placed natural children upon a foot- 

 ing of almost complete equality with children born in wedlock. Camba- 

 c6res, who acted as the rapporteur of the measure, would, indeed, have 

 put them upon a completely equal footing. " The existing differences," 

 he urged, "are the result of pride and superstition ; they are ignomini- 

 ous and contrary to justice." The materialists who now sit in the seat 

 of those sages are bent upon continuing and completing their work. 

 The recent law on divorce is but a beginning, quite insufficient to 

 satisfy the aspirations of the bolder spirits who pant for the entire abo- 

 lition of marriage upon the ground that it is " the tomb of love, and 

 the chief cause of stupidity (abetissement) and ugliness {enlaidissement), 

 in the human race." I suppose it must be conceded that stupidity 

 and ugliness are the rule, rather than the exception, in the human 

 race. But I have never been able to follow the reasoning which pro- 

 fesses to find the source of these evils in matrimony, and their remedy 

 in sexual promiscuity. Certain it is, however, that every school of 

 materialism tends to the substitution of ephemeral connections, of 

 what Mr. John Morley calls, after Rousseau, " marriage according to 

 the truth of nature " f — it is usually known as concubinage — for per- 

 manent and indissoluble wedlock, a " servitude " for which no sanction 

 is found in physical science. "The moral and legal rule of marriage 

 will be changed," M. Renan lately prophesied to the well-pleased stu- 

 dents gathered around him at the Grand- Vefour; "the old Roman 

 and Christian law will one day seem too exclusive, too narrow." And 

 evidently M. Renan thinks that day of redemption drawing nigh. 



* "Chapters in European History," vol. ii, pp. 153-159, second edition, 

 f See his account of Rousseau's mock marriage in vol. i, chap, iv, of his work on that 

 philosopher. 



