This man, about forty years old, vigorous and of
agreeable appearance, needs a woman; he is too scrupulous to seek to
seduce another man's wife, he fears intercourse with a public woman or
with a widow who would serve him as concubine. In this disquieting and
sad state, he addresses to his Church a plea of which the following is a
precis:
My wife is criminal, and it is I who am punished. Another woman is
necessary as a comfort to my life, to my virtue even; and the sect of
which I am a member refuses her to me; it forbids me to marry an honest
girl. The civil laws of to-day, unfortunately founded on canon law,
deprive me of the rights of humanity. The Church reduces me to seeking
either the pleasures it reproves, or the shameful compensations it
condemns; it tries to force me to be criminal.
I cast my eyes over all the peoples of the earth; there is not a single
one except the Roman Catholic people among whom divorce and a new
marriage are not natural rights.
What upheaval of the rule has therefore made among the Catholics a
virtue of undergoing adultery, and a duty of lacking a wife when one has
been infamously outraged by one's own?
Why is a bond that has rotted indissoluble in spite of the great law
adopted by the code, _quidquid ligatur dissolubile est_? I am allowed a
separation _a mensa et thoro_, and I am not allowed divorce. The law
can deprive me of my wife, and it leaves me a name called "sacrament"!
What a contradiction! what slavery! and under what laws did we receive
birth!
What is still more strange is that this law of my Church is directly
contrary to the words which this Church itself believes to have been
uttered by Jesus Christ: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it
be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery" (Matt.
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