“Is marriage worth while?" "Dare we hope for permanent happiness after the honeymoon?"
"How can we help to build a home partnership in which love, camaraderie, and mutual respect will be sustained?"
"Is wedded bliss, the theme on which the serene minds of yesteryear lingered lovingly, an outworn delusion?"
These are questions which keen-minded youth has insistently asked in our days of sagging domestic morals. Surrounded by discouraging influences, — frequent divorce, marital unfaithfulness, many unhappy marriages, and the rankling bitterness of domestic discord, — young men and women pause in survey; and their reaction often betrays a degree of hesitation and uncertainty.
Young people are assaulted by a ridicule of matrimony; they are barraged by appeals for a revolt against marriage; they hear catch-phrases promising a new freedom for a new age. The press, the radio, the stage, the screen, — this quadruple alliance which often helps mold their thoughts, — are often confederated in attacking home ideals. And youth cannot altogether escape the impact of newspaper headlines nor the panderings of erotic novels, which, banned by a wiser generation, are now offered in unexpurgated editions at a few pennies for daily rentals.
Bewildered young people are putting their questions concerning marriage in the present social order to a host of highly reputed counselors. They have turned to sociologists and demanded a workable code for courtship and married life, achievable principles by which the dreams of romance can be woven into the firmer texture of happy reality; but they have found that Harry Barnes and Havelock Ellis, Schmalhausen and Calverton, and other radicals have advocated extremes which stand self-condemned.
They remember the emphasis which the past years laid upon the physical side of marriage, and they hear persuasive voices arguing that physiologists and biologists can outline a clear course to avoid domestic disruption. But with life now concealing few mysteries for our young people, they must come to the realization that a mere knowledge of the body and its functions cannot provide any degree of stability for the inner life.
They have investigated the claims of psychoanalysis, only to conclude that Freudian psychology reduces emotional and spiritual life to a sensual basis.
The faddists of the hour have bid for their support, and youth watches the legislative and congressional battles in behalf of birth control with unusual interest; yet in their hearts they know that Mrs. Sanger’s system is anything but the open-sesame to marital enchantment.
With six times as many students enrolled in our colleges as in 1900, the intellectual leaders of tomorrow’s America have directed their inquiries to the wisdom enthroned on college campuses. The repeated answers of university radicalism show that the ideals of our intelligentsia are often surcharged with the liberalism of free love.
The promises of radical Socialism have recruited sizable brigades from an anticapitatistic youth; but Marxism, as it betrays its true identity in the debacle of Sovietism, is revealed as a bleeding delusion.
Professional counselors of the home — and their number is legion — have been approached in this quest of final truth; but too often their theories lead to the quicksands.
Youth has stood face to face with its parents and elders, the divinely constituted mentors of their morality; but with their own disheartening example twentieth-century fathers and mothers have often handed their children the stones of stolid indifference or the scorpions of cynicism.
Disillusioned, they have sought the solution of their problems by taking counsel with themselves. Yet at the First American Youth Congress, held at New York University, August 15-17, 1934, the more conservative element at this convention was radical enough to adopt an official platform declaring birth control desirable from a social point of view and asking for divorce by mutual consent. (Report, p. 17.)
In a final appeal, enlightenment has been sought at the altar of God. Youth has knocked at the doors of the Church and said: "In the name of religion tell us, Is marriage worth while?" "Where can we realize our ideals?” How are we to lay lasting home foundations?" The replies are bewildering; for an ominous list of divorces among the clergy, the attacks on marriage from liberal pulpits, the degradation of wedded life by groups for whom marriage is a less holy and desirable state, have combined to emphasize that even the last prop, religion, has often given way.
Not all religion, however; for as youth stands at the crossroads, Christ’s code insists that every pale of pessimism be removed; that we must have done with the carping against marriage. As youth in this second quarter of the twentieth century, analytical in its judgments, challenging its discussions, repeats its questions and demands: "Is the joy of marriage mere myth? If not, how can we find its full happiness?" it becomes the sacred duty of the Church of Jesus Christ to speak with divine authority. Conscious of its everlasting truth it must answer these questions definitely and with constructive solution. It must ceaselessly declare: Holy wedlock, when appraised in the light of Christ’s estimate and regulated by His code of marital ethics, is still one of the highest and holiest of all earthly joys.
What are these Christian pronouncements on marriage? A large library of conflicting interpretations clamors for recognition; but if the clear statements of the Scriptures are accepted, the code which the Church gives its young people demands the definite endorsement of these basic truths:
1) Marriage is a divine institution, established by God Himself. It is not a social evolution or a heritage from any alleged brute ancestry. As the gift of God, sex, marriage, and family life are holy; and even though disfigured by sin, they should be honored by all men as divine bestowals.
2) Christian marriage is a blessed ordinance, which leads to multiplied benedictions both for those in wedlock and for the race in general. Faithfulness to its requirements, under God, promotes individual and national well-being and progress.
3) Marriage is ultimately the normal state for most people. To exalt intentional abstinence from marriage as more holy and God-pleasing, willfully to spurn wedded life in the pursuit of self-centered ambitions, is to contradict God's wisdom.
4) Christian marriage is monogamous, the union of one man and one woman. Forsaking all others, the Christian husband and wife are to cleave only and always to each other.
5) Christian marriage is established only by free will and mutual consent. Christian children must not be forced to marry any one whom they cannot love. Yet young people are bound to consult their parents and to respect their advice, provided this does not overrule divine will.
6) The marriage union is lifelong, and termination, except by death, always involves a transgression of the divine Law by either husband or wife or both. Divorce is permitted only in the case of marital unfaithfulness. Malicious desertion breaks the marriage relation.
7) In the choice of a companion for life the decisive factor should not be wealth, physical attraction, higher education, and social position, but common devotion to the one Lord and Savior, the harmony of religious oneness. With the exception of the close degrees of relationship within which a Christian may not marry, there are no restrictions in the choice of husband or wife. A general compatibility of age, culture, and race is normally essential for sustained happiness.
8) In the Christian family the husband is the representative head before God and man; the wife is the helping companion. The sphere of her highest activity is the home.
9) An avowed purpose of Christian matrimony is the procreation of children. Where this first injunction, “Be fruitful and multiply," is willfully disregarded and artificial means are employed to evade the responsibilities and privileges of parenthood, the full blessings of marriage will be sacrificed.
10) Christian marriage must have a spiritual basis in the reverent acknowledgment of Jesus Christ, the Savior of all men, and in the abiding presence of His comforting and sustaining Spirit. The family altar is to be the effective pledge against shattered promises and broken hearts.
11) Christian marriage must be marked by an intensity of self-sacrificing love. Wedded life characterized by frigid aloofness is not only greatly displeasing to God, but also soon becomes a caricature of the true conjugal devotion.
12) To prepare themselves for these blessings and to meet these high requirements, young people should ask the help of God in leading clean, courageous lives and avoiding all concessions to impurity. Sin poisons their happiness and will rise up later as a specter of reproach. Only after a careful and prayerful selection of the future helpmate, when all uncertainty has disappeared, should the mutual promise be given in engagement.
These principles are the foundation upon which young people should enter marriage and build their homes. Remove any one of these specifications, and an essential element of happiness is sacrificed. True, every statement in this marriage code has been fiercely attacked, hotly denied, mercilessly criticized, or serenely disregarded by our modern sophistication. Attempts to amend and to broaden are being made every day; but the only standards that have been weighed without being found wanting and that prove their abiding power even in the swift rush of the passing moment are God’s ordinances.
The following pages seek to describe the constructive contributions which Christianity makes to married happiness. They have been written from the basic conviction that the mounting marital perplexities of our day can find solution only in remedies that conform to Christ’s teachings. The remarkable harmony which exists between these principles and reliable social data will receive conspicuous attention. Contradictory, antichristian influences will be discussed and rejected. And with this double appeal — a plea for an appreciation of matrimony, from both the Christian and the social point of view — youth is asked to look at marriage and, revaluating its sacredness and blessing, to discover the tried and true pathway to individual and family happiness.