Close your eyes and picture a sultry, humid jungle "some 100,000 years ago." Imagine a horde of gorillas, long-armed, slinking anthropoid apes, crashing through a Post-Tertiary thicket in search of food or on the paths of conquest. Look closely, and you will see that this herd moves under the leadership of a big male, the chief of many females, parent of a prolific band of little anthropoids. Look long enough, we are told by many scientists, and you will witness a tragedy which, in the none too modest statistics of present-day anthropology, is said to have occurred "millions and millions of times." As the simian parade moves on, two young males cautiously rise up behind a barricade of the dense thicket and peer with animal alarm at the disappearing horde, — their gorilla father and mothers, their little brothers and sisters! They are outcasts from their own family, banished by the law of the jungle. Depressed by the cruelty of this exile, the pair of ostracized apes lingers too long; for in a fatal moment the patriarch stops suddenly in his lurching, lumbering course. He has caught the scent of the two fugitives, and turning in his tracks, he hurls himself in their direction with a hideous snarl. One of the two, more agile and alert, escapes into the safety of the entangling overgrowth, while his hapless brother braces his hairy body to grapple with the clutches of paternal fury. A death-struggle ensues, an elemental, bestial battle between father and son. The outcome is never in doubt; and after a gory, shrieking moment the young gorilla, his receding skull battered, his ribs crushed by sinuous, bone-crunching constriction, collapses into lifeless pulp.
In the savagery of this gorilla carnage, we have witnessed, the same scientists insist, one of the most important stages in the evolution of marriage. Not the earliest and primal stage, of course, because Westermarck claims that the first traces of marriage "are found in the chelonia reptiles (turtles, tortoises, etc.),” and the Right Hon. Lord Avebury (whose degrees, titles, and distinctions, as listed in his Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, require nineteen finely printed lines) chides Westermarck for his conservatism and contends (o. c., 2): "He might have gone farther and included insects (white ants, etc.)." But the family feuds of these giant gorillas, in which a jealous father kills or exiles, his own sons as potential rivals, are scenes from the evolutionists’ history of marriage beginnings and have been accepted as truisms by Darwin and his disciples. The "Father of Evolution" declares very pointedly: "Man, as I have attempted to show, is certainly descended from some apelike creature. [Misguided apologists of man’s brute ancestry who repeatedly declare that Darwin never taught the simian origin of humanity should reread this pointed statement as well as a group of emphatic parallels.] ... He may not have been a social animal and yet have lived with several wives, like the gorilla; for all the natives agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for the mastery, and the strongest, by killing or driving out the others, establishes himself as head of the community." (Descent of Man, Vol.2, p. 361.)
The same claim is elaborately presented in a more recent monument to the brute origin of man and his institutions, the prodigious two volumes of The Science of Life, by H. G. Wells, Julian H. Huxley, and G. P. Wells. They picture a more advanced stage in the history of marriage evolution and describe the conventionalizing of these gorilla clashes in the approach to the human. We are now required to go back only some 70,000 or 80,000 years. Instead of imagining the gorilla pack, we are asked to assume a horde of hominidae, our almost human ancestors, hairy (probably black hair, though red is a possibility, we are informed), long-armed, lengthy-fingered, slinking creatures with bent legs, feet turned inward, "a head still set well forward on the neck instead of pillared erect upon it, and a brain of ape standard." Again we see that this family group moves under the leadership of a gangling male, followed by prehuman women and their offspring. Again all mature males are absent; for, the reader is assured in all seriousness, "the ruling Old Man" is guided by such a fierce jealousy that as soon as male children approach maturity, he drives them away.
Now — and this is the new stage of progress — the hominidae mothers, "after the fashion of most mammals, were disposed to protect and cherish their male quite as much as their female offspring. ... In order to keep their young sons by them, then, it was necessary for the mothers to inspire their young with awe for their seniors, and particularly for the ruling Old Man, and to make the juniors chary of infringing his rights and rousing his jealousy. By example and crude precept the natural awe of the young male for his father's strength and possible rage was given form and direction." And here comes the outcropping of that uncouth blasphemy which all too frequently disfigures modern theorization and reveals the depths to which the evolutionary philosophies invariably lead, the burlesquing of the Scriptures. Composing a studied parody on the Old Testament apothegm "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Ps. 111:10), these Three Musketeers of Materialism summarize: “The fear of the Old Man was the beginning of all wisdom and decency [our italics], ... The younger male deferred to the older male; so ... men learned the elements of self-suppression and the idea of sin, and particularly the sin of incest was born in the human mind. So, say the psychoanalysis, the first repressed complexes arose." (The Science of Life, II:1442.)
From this stage, which, they maintain, must be regarded as the beginning of society ("human society became possible through this primary suppression, and it is hard to imagine how it could have become possible in any other way," l. c.), successive developments followed with inevitable sequence. "As the young man, growing in strength and desire, wandered discontented on the borders of the family territory, he discovered there were other women in the world, women who were not the chief's women, women unprotected by the tabu. ... The young man brought the strange woman home to the tribe or to the outskirts of the tribe, or she came with him without being brought, his own woman. Less typically she beguiled him toward her parent-hearth, her man.
"Out of such crude and obvious occasions, which probably presented themselves in wide variations among the hominidae and were repeated millions and millions of times in the course of tens of thousands of years, ... exogamy [marriage by the acquisition of strange mates] would have crept into existence almost imperceptibly" (l. c., 1443).
All developments that follow are only incidental, this theory implies; the semihuman origin of marriage, provoked by a combination of jealousy on the part of a hominidae patriarch and a postanthropoid animal-mothers love of her male offspring — this is primal, basic!
This animal origin of marriage is accepted as one of the canons in the modern study of anthropology. Authors of standard works on matrimonial history unhesitatingly concede the brute beginning. George Elliot Howard, in the imposing History of Matrimonial Institutions, concludes (Vol. 1, p. 150): "So we come back to the starting-point. ... The results seem unmistakably to show, that ... early monogamy takes its rise beyond the border-line separating men from the lower animals." Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (pp. 27,28), agrees: "The marriage of mankind, as we have seen, is not an isolated phenomenon, but has its counterpart in many other animal species and is probably an inheritance from some prehuman ancestor."
A host of professional investigators as well as the inevitable dabblers have followed the trail thus blazed back to the brute. They have begun their survey of marriage with a study of animal mating and have concluded that the biological conditions out of which marriage arose "are rooted in the evolving animal world.”
We cannot thus exalt the beast, as formidable as the array of its champions may be. This elaborate theory is based, first of all, on the most suspicious sort of evidence. The gorilla parade, this Exhibit No. 1 in the case of Materialism vs. Christianity, is submitted as an unquestionable zoological truth; yet even Lord Ave-bury admits: "As a matter of fact, however, I believe that among social monkeys no permanent unions really exist. Some species live in large bands containing several old males" (l. c., 17). This simian evidence is garnered almost exclusively from the legends of African natives, who are notoriously imaginative and suggestible.
Among these contradictory claims we note the unbridged chasm which separates marriage from the nearest approach of animal relations. The lifelong companionship of two birds or beasts under natural conditions is unknown; the closest similarity, if indeed we may speak of a similarity, is a seasonal pairing of a somewhat permanent nature. The continuance of the male animal with the female after the young are born, except in the case of birds, is exceptional; and among birds this fidelity maintains itself only from nesting to nesting. The care for the family similarly is quite unknown in the animal world. Among the domestic animals, for example, the mother alone cares for the young, and among practically all animals this care extends only to the young offspring. The differences between brute mating and human marriage are so fundamental that, even to an open mind, the resemblances, overemphasized as they are, appear trivial. The devotion of love, the ideals of constancy, the permanent interest in the family, these are some of the criteria by which the Christian home is irreconcilably separated from the lair of the beast.
The gorilla genesis of marriage is further based upon theories of origins and evolutions that stifle all emotions of pure love. If, as Jacques Loeb, late professor of zoology at the University of California, writes in his biological essays entitled The Mechanistic Conception of Life (p. 62): "We ourselves are only chemical mechanisms. An idea is caused by chemical changes of the body. All moods are produced by various chemicals called hormones, that are manufactured by the different glands"; if, as Arthur Dendy, professor of zoology in the University of London, King's College, contends in his Outlines of Evolutionary Biology (p. 212); "Such a view of the origin of living things as given in Genesis, including the primal institutions of Eden, could only have arisen in a state of almost complete ignorance"; if the human race and human marriage originated, as all advances in the scheme of evolution, through "lucky strikes" (so Calkins in his Biology, p. 258), and the decisive influence of chance is a "biological dogma" according to Henry Fairfield Osborne, then the tender attachment between two lovers and the emotions of the purest affection are handed down from the beast; then Christian marriage ethics lack so much force and validity that the advancing intelligence of the "cosmic accidents" we call "men" will disdainfully refuse to be restricted by any morality.
We must also be very clear as to the far-reaching implications of this brute beginning. If man is but a highly developed beast, and if marriage is but an exalted form of animal mating, then we must ultimately be ruled by animal regulations and governed by brute impulses. If the love that binds husband and wife together and builds the Christian home as the haven of earth's highest joys is but the refinement of animal rut, an evolution from the biology of the beast, then away with marital law and order! Down with decency and purity and constancy! Let conscience perish and conventions crash! Abandon restraint! Give us a perpetual carnival of promiscuity, lifelong Saturnalia of sin! — These are the logical extremes to which the hypothesis of animality must lead. They are the avowed ideals of those enemies of the human race who, whether they parade in academic garb, operate with the ukases of Russian Communism, or deal openly with the enticements of free love, work in unholy zeal for the annulment of the divine testimonies by which we know that marriage is of God and not of the gorilla.
Because marriage is neither of brute beginning nor of human evolution, it can come only from God; and it is in this light that (he Church asks its youth to regard the blessings of Christian family life. It was God who made the race "male and female" (Gen. 1:27); it was God who commanded: "Be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:28); it was God who said: "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him" (Gen. 2:18); it was God Himself who brought the bride to her husband in the first marriage (Gen. 2:22); it was God’s Word that declared for all ages: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). The pages of the New Testament reinforce this divine institution; for it is Jesus Himself who says that in the beginning His Father instituted marriage (Matt. 19:4 f.).
It is in this sense that the Church speaks of "holy matrimony"; for as the gift of a holy God this institution, older than all others, began in Eden, in the perfect paradise of a holiness that was the image of God. While the Church cannot, as Roman theology does, call marriage a Sacrament (since there is no outward and visible sign for the grace of the forgiveness of sins as in the case of the two Scriptural Sacraments, Baptism and the Lord's Supper), it emphatically affirms in the face of a growing dissent that marriage is not merely a civil and social arrangement, but that it is, as the beginning of God's revelation says. His divine bestowal.
God being the Originator of holy matrimony, it must be respected. Coming from Him who made all things "very good," marriage should be regarded in the light of our wedding ritual, which calls it "an honorable estate, instituted by God Himself." In open protest against the attitude which likes to sneer at marriage, make it the butt of miscalled humor, brand it proletariat and bourgeois, we have the heaped statements of Scripture which reiterate the sanctity of wedlock. We see Christ's own high esteem for marriage shown at the very outset of His public ministry. Instead of gathering the multitudes in the Holy City's concourses or of ascending to a mountainous eminence, where He could be seen and worshiped by the masses as He performed His wonders before their curious eyes. He accepted an invitation to a wedding, and there at Cana, in far-off Galilee, He performed the first of those unnumbered miracles which were to bear incontestable tribute to His divine Sonship (John 2:1 ff.). To Him marriage was so sacred that He sternly forbade bungling men to interfere with its divine claims (Matt. 19:6).
Christ’s endorsement of matrimony is supported throughout the Scriptures. When the prophets of the Old Covenant sought to impress upon their own countrymen the magnificence of Jehovah’s grace to Israel and the mystic union that bound Him to His people, they could find no more fitting symbol than marriage, the intimate union that exists between husband and wife. Long into the New Testament the same exaltation of marriage continues. Writing to the Ephesians (chap. 5:25) and consciously speaking of a great mystery, St. Paul compares the love which a husband bears for his wife to that self-effacing devotion with which Jesus loved the Church. And as the light of revelation illumines the closing pages of St. John's Apocalypse, the bride, the holy Church, gazes along the horizon of prophecy for the coming of the Bridegroom, Christ.
With the highest blessing of religion thus expressed in the pictures of marriage and family life, with God addressed as "Father" and the redeemed called His "sons," it is doubly evident that the questions of marriage are not themselves subjects that must be avoided. During the Middle Ages an utterly misplaced sense of modesty branded these God-given blessings as at least semi-carnal. Prudish Puritans avoided reference to these subjects as though they were impure. Today their modem counterparts find Satan behind sex and discover only vileness in marriage.
The Church must voice its protest and declare without hesitation that marriage as God ordained it, sex as He created it, the family as He instituted it, are among the highest, holiest, and happiest gifts which His omnipotence has bestowed. It is true of course that the purity of the first Paradise has been lost and the original holiness of marriage infected by the virus of impurity, stigmatized by sin. Just as the degeneracy of all other institutions bears shocking testimony to the greed and the vice and the wanton lust of everything human, so today we often have only a pitiful caricature of that hymeneal benediction once pronounced in the sinless serenity of Eden. Instead of preserving the lifelong, harmonious companionship between husband and wife, men invented polygamy; and our country encouraged a riotous sequence of divorce which has well been styled "successive polygamy.” Instead of a reign of purity, mutual understanding, and unselfish cooperation we have the regimen of lust, filth, and crime; instead of the natural love of children, a deep-rooted aversion to parenthood. — So terrifying are the consequences of man's rebellion against God!
Yet love, marriage, the home, as originally decreed by the Father's grace, are in themselves institutions to be hallowed, as the goal toward which the faltering feet of searchers, after happiness should be directed. Those who by the rebirth of the Spirit have become new creatures in Christ know that in spite of their weaknesses their bodies are, as St. Paul stresses, temples of the Holy Spirit and that, as the Tabernacle of the Exodus was filled with the glory of God's presence, so the lives of God's children are blessed by the pervading power of the divine guidance. Twice-born young men and women must be guided by the realization that, since marriage with its attendant requirements is of God, it is good and that, while the misery and sorrow into which some marital relations have been plunged are of man, God's children must perpetuate the divine glory rather than the human debauch and strive with Heaven's aid to defeat earth's downward pull.
Because marriage comes from God above and not from man or beast below, it involves moral, not merely physical, problems. A sin against the commandment of purity is a sin against God, not simply the outraging of convention, the thoughtlessness of youth, the evidence of bad taste. The Savior tells us that, when God's children are joined in wedlock, they are united by Him, and beneath the evident strength and love that this divine direction promises is an ominous warning. Those who tamper with God's institution have lighted the fuse to the explosive of retributive justice. Marriage is so holy that of all social sins its violation invokes the most appalling consequences. Sodom and Gomorrah were burned out of existence because of a vile disregard of the holiness of marriage. David's rule over Israel was blackened by his own marital follies and by the royal lust that forgot God and dedicated itself to raging passion. The Hebrew people dropped from the family of nations largely because of the vicious practices associated with the worship of their idolatry. Throughout history red warnings mark the final record of devastated nations that forgot the divine origin of marriage and its holiness.
There is no clearer testimony to this source of marriage than the benison of happiness which it imparts. Only in this light can the beauty and serenity of wedded life be fully appreciated, the succession of joy and tribulation rightly estimated, and besetting pitfalls and temptations avoided. When a young man and woman dedicated to Christ by a living, trusting, intelligent faith kneel before the marriage altar and pray this prayer: "Heavenly Father, as we bow down before Thee in the name of our Savior, we know that marriage is the gift of Thine immeasurable love and we thank Thee that in Thy fatherly wisdom Thou hast brought us together. We are conscious of our own shortcomings; we realize that submerged selfishness will continually seek expression in our lives; but we ask Thee, who hast ordained this estate for our happiness and well-being, that Thou wouldst send us Thy strengthening and renewing Spirit, so that by His indwelling our married life may reecho, incompletely and feebly though it be, the love with which Christ, the Savior of our souls, loved the Church. In every word spoken within our home, in every deed, in every impulse and action of our wedded union, may we find Thee and the holiness with which Thou hast blessed the marriage begun in Thy name. We pledge this loyalty and recognition of Thy love and honor in Jesus' name. Amen," — when two hearts beat in the unbroken unison of this faith, the marriage that came from God will lead back to God, and the home below will be, albeit not flawless and perfect, a miniature of the home above.