A century ago, in 1839, Auguste Comte, French scientist, coined a new term. Today, when thousands of words are annually adopted by the English language, the creation of an expression causes little stir, for these words often live only a short life. In Comte’s day, however, innovations in vocabulary were taken seriously; and while most of his theories have not stood the rigorous test of the last century, his hybrid, half-Latin, half-Greek term "sociology," which supplanted all other designations for the science of society, survived to designate the study that is occupied with the origin, development, and phenomena of human society.
Even with his advanced ideas (Comte, for instance, projected a thirteen-month calendar) and his liberal notions on religion (Comte is regarded as the founder of the religion of humanity), this word-creator could not foresee the amazing multitude of conflicting absurdities for which many of his less scientific successors would seek shelter under the guise of "sociology." Pandora, classical mythology recounts, opened the box that sent the contagion of sorrow abroad through the world; and Cadmus, the ancients believed, sowed the dragon's teeth that produced a harvest of consternation. However, there is nothing mythological about the consequences of evolutionary sociology as it has developed since Comte’s day. Its theories have proposed some atrocious immoralities.
The Church has no quarrel with sociology as a purely speculative science; and there have been Christian sociologists who have traced the past of human institutions and anticipated their future in that objective research which is in no way irreconcilable with the tenets of Christianity. But when Comte's term becomes a cover for atheism, anarchism, or free love; when radical sociology becomes a leading factor in the attack on marriage now in progress, the Church parts company wfth this sociological nightmare.
In accounting for the origin of marriage, liberal sociology (that is, the attitude which discolors these courses at many of the larger American universities) accepts the brute beginning of man. It takes a primitive apelike ancestor for granted and from this starting-point proceeds to elaborate on the thesis that present-day matrimony is but a social evolution, a developed convention. We are told that our institutions form “just a film of idealism spread over the top of a million years or so of human savagery,” that what we of the twentieth century call marriage is a modernized adaptation of habits and customs which can be traced down through the aging centuries to animal-like ancestors.
For instance, in a prospectus of Lilian Eichler’s The Customs of Mankind we find these attempts to illustrate the survivals of primitive marriage habituation:
"We like to marry in June. Do you know why? Because there existed in the dawn of life a human pairing-off system which took place at the time corresponding to what is now June.
"We have 'coming-out' parties for debutantes. Do you know why? Because in primitive life the young girl was actually kept in prison until she reached marriageable age; and when she 'came out’ to be bartered as a bride, there were great tribal celebrations.
"Far back, in the beginning of life, a mother pressed her lips against the lips of her child to stifle its cries and save it from the wrath of the head clansman. That was the dawn of mother-love, the origin of the mother-kiss."
A popularized picture of reconstructed marriage history is drawn in a full-page feature entitled “How Marriage Began," which was syndicated by the Hearst newspapers. We are told:
"It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first marriage.
"A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby, protecting it from wind and cold.
"It is a queer baby, covered perhaps with reddish hair, its brow no higher than a rat's. Its jaw protrudes; its tiny, grimy hands clutch with monkey power all things within reach.
"Along comes the father, full of plans to kill a mammoth or a cave bear; interested in his stone-tipped club, but caring nothing for the mother, who has been for some time only a whining nuisance.
"He stops for a second to look at the small creature which he has added to earth's animal life.
"Its misshapen skull, ferret eyes, miniature shoulders, — something about it reminds him of his royal self as studied in the pool. He stoops to look closer. His bristly hairs are grabbed, and a weird, insane, toothless grin lights up the little monkey face.
"Then the savage takes a new view of life; there the marriage institution and the marriage problem are born simultaneously.
"Says the mammoth-hunter, with whistling words and hoarse throat-sounds half articulated, “I like this baby. He's like me. Let me hold him.
Don't you go out with him looking for food and don't leave him alone while I'm gone. I've got a bear located. No one can beat me killing bears. I'll bring the bear's heart to you this evening. You can give this baby some of the blood. It will do him good. Don't have anything to say to that mammoth-hunter in the next swamp. I want you to stick to me. I'll look after you. I have taken a fancy to that baby. He looks very much like me.'
"Off goes the father, and that savage mother in a primitive way is a wife... Society takes a new turn, and the red-haired baby has done it."
Other sources present equally absurd claims. In The Social Life of Apes and Monkeys, by S. Zuckerman, this British zoologist sets up the claim that marriage was originally restricted to one man and woman and seeks to account for monogamy in this way: Since man in the beginning of his emergence from the beast level ate meat and was therefore continually obliged to be on the hunt, it was impossible for him to be escorted by his family when he went out on the quest for food. "It is obvious," Zuckerman maintains, "that he would not have gone hunting if in his absence his females were abducted by his fellows." Therefore, comes the scientific inference, "reason may have forced the compromise of monogamy." A reviewer prosaically summarizes: "All the dizzy heights of romanticism, of the tenderest of human emotions, of culture and the arts, — all indeed that separates man from his primate cousins, — may conceivably therefore have been largely due to the fact that he was not originally a vegetarian."
Even more remarkable are some of the conclusions drawn by Albert E. Wiggam, D. Sc., arm-chair sociologist. He asks: "Is the love of a fireplace, even in city homes, due to some natural characteristic in human nature rather than to childhood memories of home and general social custom?" He answers: "Yes. Most anthropologists believe it is natural because in savage times the men who naturally loved to sit about the camp-fire and counsel with their families, neighbors, and war chiefs tended to survive, while the isolated unsocial wanderer perished. There seems to be something natural about it, or else people in great cities would hardly be willing to pay from one to two hundred dollars a year extra rent for an apartment with a wood-burning fireplace and thirty dollars a cord for wood."
Link by link, then, marriage as we have it today has been welded to ancestral custom, and elaborate theories are built up to explain the development of domestic institutions on the basis of this immemorial usage. At the beginning of human activity, many sociologists assert in harmony with the general program laid down by the evolutionary theory, there was no marriage, simply a chaos of promiscuity. Since this disorder proved unsatisfactory, polygamy, the practice of having several wives at the same time, arose. Largely because of the murder of infant girls a third stage developed, polyandry, in which a woman possesses several husbands. The last stage in this development was reached when the polyandrous relations, because of their patent difficulties, gave way to monogamy.
It is admitted, however, that the path of marriage history is not nearly as smooth and regular as this classification would imply; and in the prodigious literature treating the early family we find many discussions which oppose these theories and complicate the situation. We read of exogamy and endogamy, of totemism and tabu, of group marriage, of the horde and mother right, of time and trial marriage, of kinship systems and marriage by capture, and of other theories based upon the many investigations that have penetrated into the remote comers of the globe. The inferences derived from these social surveys are often contradictory; yet they are united in the conclusion that marriage as we have it is nothing more than an evolved human institution, drastically modified in the past and capable of equally drastic modification in the future.
The inevitable procedure in this attempt to demonstrate the evolution of marriage is to refer to the family habits of primitive people and draw the deduction that these are the significant survivals of original customs. Thus certain Central Australian tribes are said to practice communal marriage; the claim is immediately advanced that all marriages were originally of this communal type. An Iroquois warrior of the Seneca tribe and of the Wolf clan is not permitted to take his squaw from the clans of the same name in the other five tribes of the Iroquois; consequently exogamy, the prohibition of marrying within the real or supposed kin, is regarded as primal. The Eskimos of Cape Work feature a ceremonial capture of brides. This is drafted as part evidence for the primitive marriage by capture. In thus finding marriage origins in the modern customs of the Siberian Ostyaks, the Buriaks, Kalmucks, Altaian Turks, the Bantu tribes, the Masai, the aboriginal Austral-asians, and in other barbarian fringes beyond civilization^ frontiers there is a fundamental error; for these habits are often nothing more than evidences of moral deterioration. The polygamy that Livingstone found along the Zambesi is no evidence of a primal plurality of wives. It would be just as unwarranted for a later student of history, reviewing the development of law and order in the United States from a distance of, say, 1,000 years, to conclude on the basis of snatch observations that our country originally had no governmental authority, but that this developed through these successive stages: First, the anarchy led by underworld chiefs; then, the wider authority of the gang; subsequently, the improvement wrought by self-constituted, sober-minded citizens; and finally, the judicial system produced by representative government.
Equally faulty is the neglect of the facts which contradict these hypotheses. There is evidence of primitive monogamy in Mexico, Peru, and many widely separated areas; and it is certainly as scientific to employ the multiplied instances of monogamous marriage among ancient non-Christian peoples to show original monogamy as it is to cite pagan multiple marriage as evidence for early polygamy.
Again, incontrovertible facts, not the Munchausenish musings, point to conclusions at variance with the sociological tenets. Archeologists have uncovered the earliest extensive evidences of human civilization and the oldest written records of the human race in the Tigro-Euphrates Valley and in the Nile country. Particularly in the cuneiform records of Babylonia, which have made possible an accurate survey of marriage relations in early days, one seeks in vain for evidence of promiscuity, exogamy, marriage by capture, kinship tabu, and the other elaborate propoundings of the social evolutionists. The Code of Hammurabi and literally hundreds of marriage-contract tablets show us that matrimony in those days of high antiquity was in many ways not fundamentally different from modern marriage. In beginning his essay on the genesis of marriage, A. W. Nieuwenhuis, professor of anthropology in the University of Leyden, says (The Book of Marriage, pp. 53, 75): "Whereas it was formerly believed that a premarriage period could be proved in the case of some of the savage races extant today, this has now been shown to be a mistake." And at the conclusion he summarizes: "What is, then, the result of our glance into the primeval age of man? That the essential relations have from the very earliest times been the same as are found among the highly cultured peoples of today.... Marriage can never be looked upon as a mere convention."
Finally, the idea of marriage as a social evolution is ruled out because of the terrifying incentive to the destruction of morals which this theory furnishes. If marriage is a purely human institution, regulated by human attitudes and customs, it has no binding force for any unconventional soul. If the Soviet ruin of marriage is laughed off as an interesting social experiment, there can be no complaint when this ruthless disregard of marital morality leads to national disintegration, disease, and death. If past ages have swung from promiscuity through polygamy to monogamy, there is no reason why a degenerate age of the future cannot swing back. If matrimony is ordained by man, what charge can we lay at the door of any unshackled spirit that follows an individualistic conception of marriage with its ridicule of restraint?
This smiling at immorality has become a mark of radical sociology. In Principles of Sociology, by Rudolph M. Binder, of New York University, the red flag of revolt against decency is raised in these inflammatory (and highly illogical) pronouncements: "Monogamy, with its lifelong hold on both parties, is incompatible with personal freedom. Divorce entails expense, trouble, and a certain stigma as long as present social attitudes prevail; it is better, consequently, to have no marriage ceremony at all and simply have those who love each other live together as husband and wife as long as they agree with each other. Monogamy is only a fallacy which many people believe in but few really observe."
In his identically named Principles of Sociology Fred A. Bushee (p. 269), professor of sociology in the University of Colorado, sings this Marseillaise of the marriage revolution: "The demand for greater [sexual] freedom seems sometimes so strong as to threaten the permanency of the family union; yet it is not without its favorable aspects.... The [marital] relationship itself might be improved by ... making it, so far as possible, the expression of voluntary action resulting from mutual attraction of the sexes."
Inseparably linked with this rejection of conventional marriage we find the confident prophecies of a coming era of free love. Edward A. Ross, professor of sociology in the University of Wisconsin, typifies this prediction in his The Outlines of Sociology (p. 394): "The endeavor to institutionalize a thing so intimate and personal as mating ... will be abandoned as mankind becomes more enlightened." He foresees the day when advanced thinkers will "anticipate that sex relations between the mature will be but a private matter."
Before this Utopia of sociology is reached, however, a radical program of iconoclasm must be inaugurated. First of all, Christianity must go. Mentors of American sociology have declared:
"Current Christian and Jewish [i.e.. Old Testament] teaching as to purity and modesty is all wrong." (Creed of a Modern Sociologist, by Harry Elmer Barnes and L. L. Bernard.)
"No extant moral code, not even that derived from the Bible, possesses divine authority. Jesus was merely a religious reformer."
"If it had not been for the spiritually unclean and morally dwarfish attitude of the Church as embodied in its obscene morals, we would not now be entangled in these violent and chaotic alterations in behavior which trouble the contemporary scene." (Samuel D. Schmalhausen in Calverton and Schmalhausen, Sex and Civilization, p. 365 f.)
"All sex instruction should be rigorously and absolutely divorced from religion, which .has been the source of most of the information about sex in the past and of the physical and psychic misery which has been engendered thereby." (Harry Elmer Barnes, o. c., p. 320.)
"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion as organized in its churches has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world." (Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian.)
There are depths of perversity to which misguided men may lead themselves; but below there is this subzero level reached by leaders who brand Scriptural principles as conducive to matrimonial misery and defiantly dedicate their efforts to further epileptic morality. One could blame the firemen for the fire, the coast guard for the shipwreck, the meteorologist for the typhoons, with the same absurd inconsistency which charges the Church with the responsibility for indecency.
We seek almost in vain for an explanation of the infuriated assault against marriage by the shock troops of animalism. One is inevitably driven to ask: Who benefits by these uprisings against morality and conscience? Even self-respecting skeptics have spurned this cut-throat antagonism, admitting the brutality of attempting to rob one's fellow-man of his confidence and comfort. In a recent issue of Neues Wiener Journal Dr. E. Wengraf, self-confessed infidel and opponent of Christianity, presents this incisive denunciation of atheism’s program of propaganda:
"All antireligious propaganda, including all attempts to get “fun” out of religion, is in my opinion equal to a crime. It is immoral as well as abominable. Not because the author of this utterance is an eager believer, — for this he is in no way, — but owing to a simple lesson which lifelong experience has taught him: A religious person, living in the same circumstances as an irreligious one, is decidedly the happier of the two. In my personal indifference and skepticism, that is averse to all positive faith, I often envy those of my fellow-men whose deep religious feeling gives them a firm support in all tempests of life. To make fun of their religion, thus seeking to uproot the peace of their souls, is certainly a shameful endeavor. Although I am opposed to all proselytism, I nevertheless can comprehend that a person who is firmly convinced of soul-saving faith derived from the study of the Bible seeks to convert others. On the other hand, I cannot understand the reason for infidelity propaganda. No one has a right to deprive his neighbor of his protecting shelter, be it ever so deficient, unless he is perfectly sure of being able to offer him a better and more beautiful resort. But to entice others to leave the inherited home of their souls in order to place them in the wilderness of hypothesis and philosophical interrogations, in which they are lost without guidance, — this undertaking is either a criminal fanaticism or a criminal heedlessness."
Thoughtful readers will agree to these charges of criminal fanaticism and heedlessness. Atheistic sociology has been a moving factor in the travail of young souls torn from their Christian anchorage. Denying, as our materially minded sociology does, this foundation truth of a Christian’s every-day life that "in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28), it has removed the actuating basis of true morality and has become a menace to the society which it seeks to analyze.