Marriage, divorce, and eugenics / [Montague Crackanthorpe].

  • Montague Hughes Crackanthorpe
Date:
[1910?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Marriage, divorce, and eugenics / [Montague Crackanthorpe]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/18 (page 701)
    he has since exchanged for a higher dignity, wrote the following striking passage : Eugenics merely extends a principle to which the Church is already committed, the principle that material environment is a factor in spiritual welfare. This is the meaning of the rapid growth of Public School and University Settlements in the poorer parts of our great cities, and of the complicated organisation of clubs and societies which now forms so important a part of its Church life in town parishes, and drew from an Anglican lay¬ man the half serious reproach that the clergy are ‘ leaving the Word of God to serve billiard tables.’ And the same principle underlies the whole of the philanthropic effort, so closely and so honourably connected with Christian religion, for the care of the helpless and suffering. Hospitals, orphan homes, institutions for the care of the feeble-minded, and all the many agencies for the relief and alleviation of poverty and infirmity, obtain an amount of support from Christians, as such, which plainly testifies that the Church is willing and anxious to do everything in its power for the battle of life and for the Kingdom of Heaven, which to the Christian are two ways of expressing the same thing. But science, which is simply the trained and co-ordinated observation of facts, teaches us that pre-natal conditions are in a large proportion of cases as important as post-natal, and it follows that the duty is to prevent the causes rather than to alleviate the results of physical and intellectual degeneracy. The curate and the Church dignitary, as will be noticed, were travelling on the same road and towards the same goal, but were passing different milestones, the curate, in his burning zeal, running ahead of the other. Different, too, were their respective appreciations of what they were about. The curate (like M. Jourdain and his prose) was talking Eugenics without knowing it to the costermonger class; the Church dignitary knew that he was talking Eugenics, and talking it to a cultured class, for the quoted passage was part of an address he delivered before ‘ The Eugenics Education Society ’ in Caxton Hall, Westminster. ■m And now let me shortly sum up this paper : (a) Marriage—according to Eugenics—a privileged, yet ter¬ minable, contract, a contract of supreme moral, spiritual and social value, not an indissoluble bond. (b) Restrictions on marriage to be based, not on decrees of General Councils of the Church, but on known laws of health and human progress. These laws, once ascertained, to be as binding on the conscience as the decalogue. (c) Marriage not to be entered on unless there are present soundness of body, saneness of mind, and unity of spirit. These conditions fulfilled, marriage takes on a sacramental quality; without them, incalculable misery may ensue. (d) The mission of Eugenics—the education of public opinion on the great question of the relations between the sexes. i