p. 254Matrimony

In the early education of youth, women were represented as the objects of respectful love, and the dispensers of happiness. The child was taught that, to be an honorable and happy man, he should prove himself worthy of the love of a virtuous woman. This lesson (says Uhlrich von Lichtenstein) every boy sucked in with his mother’s milk; so it was not wonderful that love and honor should become identified in his soul. When I was a child so young that I used to ride upon a stick, I was fully persuaded that I ought to honor women with all that I possessed,—love, goods, courage, and life.

Kenelm Henry Digby.

She was high-minded in nothing but in aspiring to perfection, and in the disdain of vice: in other things covering her greatness with humility among her inferiors, and showing it with courtesy among her peers.

Robert Southwell, S. J. (The Martyr).

We are writing for men of the world, advising them how to be good among the bad, and best among the good; leading them by pleasant and devious paths to the contemplation of soul-stirring models of all human excellence; and teaching where to find both true happiness and the surest means of attaining it.

One chief service that, as teacher and guide, we can render the young man about to enter upon the battle of life,—is to direct him in finding the woman whom God has chosen for him, to be his life-companion, his most faithful friend, his stay and counselor,—the joy of his heart, the queen and the light of his home. True Christian men, men who have had experience of life’s bliss and life’s bitterest sorrows, of its difficulties and disappointments, its disasters and its triumphs,—of all the sweets of a home made bright and sunny and blissful, or of a home made dark and dreary and desolate,—will say, on reading the title of this chapter, that its subject-matter is the most important in this book. They will also say, that a priest’s hand alone can trace out the rules which should guide pure-hearted youth in finding the worthy object of love, and point out the conditions on which the divine blessing secures to spotless mutual love all the felicities of this life and the next.

With such a purpose, and cherishing the hope that He for whose glory we labor, will enable us to write what is apposite to our purpose, we approach this portion of our appointed task.

Christ’s First Miracle wrought to Honor Matrimony

Has it ever struck you, dear reader, that the first graceful act recorded of the Lord, after he had quitted the privacy of his mother’s home at Nazareth, had been publicly baptized in the Jordan, and had spent in the wilderness the “forty days” so full of heroic abstinence and uninterrupted prayer,—was to go with his Blessed Mother and his disciples to the marriage-feast at Cana, a little town quite near Nazareth? His first stupendous miracle,—the changing of the water into wine,—was performed there, at the instance of that same Mother.

So, she who was the Mother of the New Life, the parent of that regenerated humanity out of which Christ’s Bride, the Church immortal and unfailing, was to be formed, and He the Bridegroom, the abiding Love and Worship of redeemed humanity, were both present at that marriage-feast. It was fitting that she, the Eve of the new creation, should urge the Second Adam to give a new wine to the hosts and their guests. For was it not from the hearts of both these true Parents of our race, that flowed the Blood given as the price of our redemption, and applied in the Sacraments as the sole means of our sanctification?

The Model of Wedded Love

These Two, who loved each other as Mother and Son had never loved before, and who loved us with an utter love, were united in that great sacrificial oblation, which repaired the world; the Son giving Himself for our ransom, and the Mother giving herself in and with her Son, as she stood sublime and unshrinking beneath that Tree of Life. There must be, eternally, the exemplar of true love. For love is the gift of self; and these Parents of our souls, loving us truly, loved us utterly, giving themselves to death and shame and suffering unutterable, that we might live.

And so the new wine of Cana was the fit emblem of that sanctifying blood, of that all-powerful grace of Christ, which was to hallow anew the most ancient of God’s ordinances, the matrimonial union. By the blood of Christ was the mutual love of husband and wife to be consecrated, and the whole stream of human existence to be purified. In that love of Mother and Son, as afterward in the love of Christ for his Church and of the Church for Him, were all the children of both to find the model of chaste love.

Hence it is that he could say to his own, a few hours before he gave himself into the hands of his enemies: “This is My Commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”¹1St. John, xv. 12, 13.

If such be the divine model according to which we the children of the Crucified have to practice toward each other, in the intercourse of social life, all true love, all love that God may bless,—how much more is that special love which two souls who give themselves each to the other for the holy and difficult companionship of a life-long existence, to be molded on this eternal pattern of self-sacrificing charity!

Hence, also, is it that Christ’s great Apostle has written this complementary commandment: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it, that he might sanctify it.”²2Ephesians, v.

Seek for your Bride the Purest and the Best

It is the dearest interest of every young man seeking a companion, who is to be sun of his life, the honor and treasure of his home, that he should find the best, the purest, the most worthy in every way of the devotion of a whole lifetime, and that, having found her, he should not only keep her pure, stainless, and worthy of all love and honor, but that every day of his life he should labor to make her more so, and be himself before her eyes the living and ever-present copy of Christ’s goodness and devotion.

The ideal of female loveliness, which is familiar to all pure Christian minds, is not so much one of bodily beauty as of that spiritual grace and attractiveness that arise from maturity of virtue superadded to baptismal innocence undefiled. It is extraordinary how deeply and widely the Lives of the Saints, the sweetness of woman’s countenance in every Christian home, and the representations of Christian painting and sculpture even in the rudest periods of mediæval art, had impressed on the mind of Christendom the image of supernatural beauty.

Dante’s portraitures, so heavenly in their grace and majesty, were exact pictures of living women he had seen in Italy, in his own native Florence. At the distance of six centuries, Tennyson only reproduces the ideal of Dante; for it existed in England as well as in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and, through God’s good providence, it is still preserved in both countries in the lives and homes of millions.

Was it Isabella-the-Catholic, the worthy descendant of Elizabeth of Hungary, that the great modern poet had in his mind’s eye when he drew the following likeness?

Wherever a Catholic mother,—even in the lowliest condition of life,—is faithful to her conscience and observant of the rules of her Religion in all that concerns the education of her daughters, there is little danger of having these grow up to anything but a most pure and lovely maidenhood. We have before us now families buried amid the squalor of these groups of “shanties” which cover the most uninviting portions of Manhattan Island, and in these to all appearance most wretched abodes are to be found the loveliest types of female innocence and beauty. Fathers and mothers are there who prefer the comparative isolation and greater domestic privacy of these cabins, because they can there preserve their dear ones from the contamination of a more crowded neighborhood and the dangers of swarming tenement-houses. In very truth, there are families who thus cluster together on the barren rocks or in the fever-generating swamps of Harlem, because they thus can form associations of neighborhood that remind them of the village community of the far-away fatherland.

Whether in the cabin, therefore, or in the palace, it depends upon the mother’s training, watchfulness, and example, that her girl shall be or not an angel on earth, a beautiful soul shedding around the light of heaven and the perfume of paradise.

Be it your first and chief care to seek the beautiful soul much more than the beautiful body. There are comely and attractive women, who resemble exquisite vases of rich material and most classic form, but filled with a poisonous or loathsome liquor: woe to the imprudent man who should taste of the foul contents! The beautiful soul is a treasure beyond all price, placed sometimes in a homely vessel of unrefined material or rude workmanship, but whose value is altogether independent of either form or material. It is the most exquisite of perfumes given forth by the least brilliant of flowers; the water of life, of delight, and immortality, often gushing forth from a spring in some obscure or barren vale, or as often placed by the hand of the Creator in the lowliest and homeliest of vessels.

Young men who are themselves pure of heart will surely be directed by the secret and irresistible charm of true goodness toward a maidenly heart worthy of their affections.

That is the one supremely precious quality which a young man must find in the companion he would choose for life. There can be no love without it. For love is founded on esteem, and esteem can only rest on the certainty of innocence in the beloved object. One cannot love what one does not respect; but how can a young and pure heart respect a woman,—though divinely fair,—from whom the charm, the freshness, the fragrance of purity have departed,—like a beautiful flower rifled of its sweets and containing only the putrid corpses of the insects that have preyed upon it?

Be slow, therefore, in judging for yourself, even where, with the charm of personal beauty, you have found in a girl the outward signs of maidenly modesty. There is One who reads the heart and who will surely guide you in your choice, if you are only careful to consult His pleasure, much more than the inclination begotten by a fair face, a graceful person, and a modest bearing. It is all-important to you that you should be master of your own soul at this juncture, when a hasty choice might be a wrong choice, and when a wrong choice would make shipwreck of your whole future life. Lift up your soul to Him who is bound not to fail those who seek His light and strength in a choice so momentous.

There are other qualities beside maidenly innocence, even when it embellishes the highest beauty of form. We would say to you,—whether you be a prince or a peasant, the wealthiest of men or the poorest, depending only on your stout heart and strong arms,—Let the woman you would make your wife, come from a well-regulated home, where the womanly virtues are carefully cultivated. Such homes are to be found in every class of society.

Though you feel drawn toward a maiden by the twofold attraction of beauty and apparent modesty and innocence, show not your interest, and give not your heart away, till you know more. Watch how she bears herself under the trials of home-life; what respect she shows for her parents, what sympathy toward the suffering; make sure that she is unselfish in all her conduct toward others, and especially in her sisterly devotion toward her younger brothers and sisters.

She who is ever mindful of the wants, the comforts, and happiness of others, and forgetful only of herself; who manifests that motherly devotion toward the younger members of the household, and tenderness toward every form of suffering,—will be sure to bring to your home the same wifely and motherly qualities. She will make the happiness of your life.

To learn what she really is, be not content with an acquaintance formed in the ball-room, or amid the crowd and glitter of a watering-place. Study her in her home-life. You need a wife who is to be your life-long companion, your most constant and trusted friend, your wisest and most disinterested counselor; the dear sharer of all your holiest joys and deepest convictions; the mother and educator of your children,—fitted by her enlightenment and solid piety, to bring the religion of your fathers home to their minds and their hearts,—who will not be satisfied with teaching them the great truths of Revelation, but show them these truths practiced and made lovely in her own daily life; the prudent governor of your household, careful of every detail of domestic economy, knowing how to make her servants obey and work by love, charitable toward the poor, hospitable toward all, lovely and venerable in the eyes of your friends, your relatives, and acquaintance.

Together with innocence of life, solid piety, a good practical education, and the wifely and motherly qualities enumerated above,—is needed that sound sense, without which the most brilliant accomplishments only serve to make a young woman vain, idle, unreliable, and dangerous.

We have not mentioned truthfulness, because we suppose that there can be no true piety without it. We say to young men, Never give your heart or your hand to a woman who is capable of falsehood; just as we should say to a young woman, Never accept the love or the friendship of a man whom you know to be addicted or inclined to intemperance.

In mentioning piety,—the enlightened and hearty practice of your own faith,—as an indispensable quality in the wife of your choice, we have sufficiently warned you against irreligious women, the worst curse of domestic life or public society.

Such, then, are the women—to omit the mention of other qualities, kindred to those which we have described,—who are alone worthy of a true man’s love. They are the true women. Should Providence guide you to the possession of such, then are you most blessed. Your parents can give you education, position, wealth, an honored name and home; society may bestow honor and trust; but far above all that parents can bequeath and society can confer of what is conducive to happiness and honor, is a true woman, given to a man’s heart by Him who knows the heart’s needs, and wherein consist the felicity of a man’s household and the glory of his life.

How to be Worthy of a True Woman

But how are you to make yourself worthy of such a God-sent love? How are you to guard and cherish the treasure of a noble woman’s heart? This is a most vital question.

Men are but too apt to think,—or to conduct themselves as if they thought,—that they had a right to expect a wife to bring them not only accomplishments and graces far superior to their own, but a soul unstained by sin, and a heart untouched by any other love. There are men,—very young men too,—who only think of the sacred and awful responsibilities of matrimony, when they have wasted their life on the worst pursuits and profaned their affections by the most criminal indulgence, and who believe that they honor a pure woman by offering her in exchange for the untouched and boundless wealth of her maidenly love, a heart utterly incapable of feeling, and a soul incapable of understanding, what love is.

It is, we fear, but a too frequent occurrence, that a bridegroom should bring to the matrimonial altar, manhood without the freshness, the innocence, and the vigor of youth, wealth without religion or piety or virtue, position without the honor and integrity which can alone adorn it,—while he expects and demands that the bride shall be as fair, as pure, as excelling in all natural and supernatural grace as Eve coming in her perfect womanhood from the hand of God. But we pause here, and leave what else might be said to the reflections of all good men.

You are, therefore, to be most earnest in keeping or in making yourself worthy, in the sight of the all-judging God, of the true love you are in quest of. A virginal heart with its perennial flow of deep, chaste, elevating love, is not unlike the San-Graal of our ancient Christian chivalry. Only the knight who had never stained his baptismal purity, or who had recovered his innocence by dint of heroic expiation, could possess or even behold from afar the sacred vessel in which had flowed the blood of the Lord. Even so, in those who seek the treasure of a pure womanly heart,—it is required that they should themselves be pure in order to appreciate it and to cherish its possession as dearer than life itself.

The holy flame and mighty power of true love which God the Creator would place in wedded hearts, is a something so divine, that he would have both man and maiden purify and prepare their souls by the two great Sacraments intended to bestow holiness where it is not and to increase it still more where it is. This wedded love and the special grace brought to the souls of worthy bride and bridegroom by that other Great Sacrament of Matrimony,—are the well-spring of all human happiness, the principle of domestic bliss,—the heart and center of all fatherly and motherly goodness. We know not how to convey the truth which is here before us,—and on which depends the existence of the Christian family and of human civilization itself.

Unspeakable Importance of the Sacrament of Matrimony received with Reverence

The sacrament of Matrimony received with the deep reverence which its sanctity demands, is the consecration of human love in its highest form save one, that by which the heart dedicates its affections to God, to a life of contemplation, prayer and praise, or to the active service of Religion and Charity. We are, however, at present concerned with the no less vital subject of hallowed wedded love.

We would fain impress upon the minds of parents and of their marriageable sons and daughters, the necessity of treating this great sacrament of matrimony with the respect which is due to the most ancient ordinance of religion, which Christ so reverenced that He would have his own union with the Church serve as a model for the contract or covenant by which bride and bridegroom pledge themselves mutually to life-long devotion and self-sacrifice; and His own sacred love for the Church become the type of the incomparable and surpassing love which a true husband is to cherish toward his companion.

We would also impress this truth on those who are the teachers and guides of the Christian people. When they see, every day, human legislators casting aside, as useless or as restraints to individual right or civil authority, the sacred and time-honored marriage laws of the Catholic Church, and when non-Catholic denominations either concur with the civil magistrate in denying all sacramental character to the matrimonial rite, or strike at Christ’s own legislation by countenancing or authorizing divorce,—it is high time that we should strengthen within our hearts and our homes the faith in the unity and divinity of Matrimony.

All possible persuasion should be used to make young people prepare their souls for this central act in their lives; and, therefore, all care should be taken to instruct both in public and in private, the faithful people on the nature of this sacrament, on the countless and priceless graces laid in store by God’s fatherly providence in behalf of all who approach it reverently and worthily, and on the fatal and irreparable consequences of a marriage contracted without due deliberation or preparation.

All possible solemnity should be given to the marriage service. When we say “service,” we do not mean the nuptial benediction given either in the church or elsewhere, without mass; but we mean the whole divine function as set forth in the Ritual, the nuptial benediction in the morning before God’s altar, and followed immediately by the Nuptial Mass. The two together,—the sacrament and the sacrifice, the contract with the priest’s blessing, and the oblation of the Divine Victim of Calvary, to call down all the graces and joys of Heaven on the union of two pure Christian hearts,—this alone is the Marriage Service.

Magnificent Ritual of the Nuptial Mass

It is impossible to reflect seriously on the reality as we here present it, and impossible to read the sublime Nuptial Mass with the grand blessing after the Pater Noster, without feeling how solemn, how awful, and yet how joyous is this august function of the Church of our fathers. Is it not, therefore, sad,—nay, most deplorable,—to see it curtailed and degraded by the want of faith and want of reverence of so many Catholics, who make of the celebration of matrimony only a profane and empty form, into which no religious thought is allowed to enter?

“One of the most bitter griefs which God’s ministers have to endure, is to be forced to witness or bless the union of persons who contract matrimony without being seemingly conscious of the sacredness of the rite, of the pure dispositions they are bound to bring to it, of the priceless graces attached to it, or of the terrible consequences of its profanation.”³3“The Golden Treasury of Prayer,” p. 429.

To be sure, the marriage contract, for its validity in the eyes of the Church, needs only the presence of her authorized minister and that the contracting parties be perfectly free according to her laws. But what may satisfy the nude letter of the law ought not to satisfy the conscience of parents who fear God and of children brought up in His fear.

A marriage ceremony performed in the Church, at evening, with no matter what pomp, is not the marriage service as Catholics understand it. The altar may be aflame with lights and decked out with the loveliest flowers of spring; the organ may give forth the most triumphant of “Wedding Marches;” and the edifice itself be crowded with sympathetic friends or a throng of curious, idle sight-seers. All that is not the divinely beautiful Nuptial Mass,—the real marriage service performed at morning-tide; the prayerful assemblage of relatives and friends assembled round the altar on which He is present who died to win to Himself a spotless and immortal bride in our Mother the Church; the young lovers bringing to His feet their sinless hearts, that by His blessing their God-given love may be hallowed, deepened and elevated, and confirmed forever; and then the oblation of the unbloody sacrifice which commemorates and continues that of Calvary, the sublime and prophetic benediction of the Propitiare, uttered on these wedded souls before the Holy Communion;—the whole crowned by their partaking together of that Bread which is the figure, foretaste, and pledge of the eternal possession;—this, and this only, is the Marriage Service of the Catholic Church,—a rite appealing to all the most sublime beliefs, and stirring the Christian heart to its inmost depths.

Yes, everything in the Catholic doctrine and practice impresses on the souls of the young, that the love which God hallows is a gift above all price, which can only be worthily received in a sinless heart, and which it must be the study and labor of a lifetime to cherish and to increase.

True Love ever Reverent

On this last thought,—the duty and the necessity of guarding, cherishing, and increasing this blessed mutual affection,—we must insist a little further.

True love,—that is, God-given love,—fills the soul with infinite reverence for the loved object,—else it will forthwith degenerate into lust, which is the death of love and of respect. We cannot imagine the young Tobias and his bride ever losing for each other a particle of that holy respect and tender regard which God had planted in their souls. Even when the Archangel who had been sent to preside over their union, had withdrawn his visible presence, his counsels, and his protection, we cannot help following the saintly exiles all through their life-journey as walking ever hand in hand beneath the all-seeing Eye, and encouraging each other to be daily and hourly more worthy of Him in inward thought and outward deed.

Such were also Malcolm Canmore and his sainted wife, Margaret, whose ardent love deepened and grew with every successive year,—the soldier-king becoming ever more penetrated with reverence, gentleness and tenderness in presence of his lovely wife, whom he could not think of without tears, without wondering how such an angel was given to him to love and keep. The very prayer-books she used were to him a something holy, which he would allow no one to carry but himself, kissing them devoutly as he gave them to her or received them from her, in presence of his rude Scottish chieftains, and till his dying day demeaning himself in public and in private, toward his spotless queen, as if he were her servant and bond-slave. How she must have loved him all the while,—how truly, how tenderly,—that she could thus inspire him with a devotion that never decreased and a reverence which ever grew with age!

So was it with another king,—a king too of the same old Gaelic race,—though separated from Scotland by a narrow sea,—Brian, King of Ireland. He is called the most kind-hearted of men by the author of the Nials-Saga, and regarded by the Norsemen of that and succeeding ages as the champion of the Christian faith against Scandinavian idolatry and barbarism, perishing like a martyr on Good Friday (April 18), 1014, because he would not himself draw the sword, shed blood, or defend his own life on the day when Christ died for us,—though he directed the battle against the enemies of his country and his faith. The Saga mentions his first wife, Kormlada, an inveterate heathen, put away by him, doubtless, because of her utter wickedness and sorcery. “She was the fairest of all women, and the best gifted in everything that was not in her own power, but it was the talk of men that she did all things ill over which she had any power.”⁴4Nials-Saga, or “The Story of the Burnt Nial,” Dasent’s translation, vol. ii., p. 323. That is, she coveted and possessed all the forbidden secrets of magic, and made the very worst use of her own splendid abilities. “Kormlada was not the mother of King Brian’s children, and so grim was she against King Brian after their parting that she would gladly have him dead.”⁵5Ibidem, p. 324.

This fury, if she did not cause the successful invasion of Ireland by the Vikings, was most certainly the soul of the mighty league formed against Brian and the Christians by the Norsemen, and in which the heroic old man lost his life.

Far different must have been Brian’s Christian wife, the mother of the three brave sons who fought with their father on that memorable day,—and the youngest of whom was miraculously cured by the blood which spurted from his father’s death-wound.⁶6Ibidem, p. 337.

It was an age,—no matter what modern fanatics may affirm to the contrary,—when, in Ireland, overrun by the fierce worshipers of Thor and Odin, no Christian father of a family could tolerate within his own household treason to Christ in wife, or son, or daughter. The woman who was Brian’s companion during all his long struggles against invasion from abroad and strife from within, was one worthy to rear such sons as those who fought Ireland’s most glorious battle, and who won at the same time a decisive victory for the true faith. We mention these names and dates to stimulate our students of Irish History to complete the picture we have outlined, and thus to compare the practical faith of the court of Ireland in 1014 with that of Scotland half a century later.

Of the exquisite picture of true conjugal love presented by the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and her noble husband, the Landgrave Louis of Thuringia, we wish to say nothing here.⁷7See Montalembert’s “Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary;” also “Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church,” chap. xxxiii., p. 343. Their contemporaries on the throne, St. Louis of France, and his wife, Margaret of Provence, are no less admirable, and, perhaps, will appear more imitable to our readers. Louis brought to the bride chosen for him by his saintly mother a soul which still preserved its baptismal innocence unstained; and she, on her side, had been reared with no less care in the refined court of her father, King René. When the young king bound himself by vow to rescue the Holy Land from Saracen rule, no persuasion could induce Queen Margaret to part from his side. Authentic history has preserved in all its touching details the story of her heroic magnanimity in the midst of the greatest sufferings and dangers, as well that of her royal husband’s infinite respect for “his Lady and Companion.” The Mohammedans themselves were touched and surprised by the reverence in which she, a woman, was held by Louis and his warlike barons.

Indeed, domestic history,—the history of the Home,—in the Catholic ages, when all Western Europe was one in faith, is the history of man’s reverence for woman, of the respectful, faithful, and often heroic service paid by lovers and husbands to the women of their choice. Woman,—whether in the hut or in the palace,—was given by the Church to man to be loved, honored, reverenced, and served by him all his life long,—in memory of St. Joseph’s loving service to Mary, and in imitation of Christ’s constant love and care for His Spouse, the Mother of all Christians.

Such were the ideas and ideals of our fathers. Nor have these ideals yet ceased to govern hearts and homes in our midst.