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.

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    ‘ unclean animals ’ which entered the ark in pairs typified married folk. He adds, with a stroke of unconscious humour, that the number of the unclean animals was limited to a single pair of each kind with the object of making it impossible for either member of the pair to perpetrate a second marriage. The ante-medieval theologians were great adepts at wresting texts of Scripture from their obvious meaning in order to bolster up their own special views, but they did not rely on Scripture alone. When that failed them they fell back on unverifiable Church tradition. Tor instance, being unable to get over the fact that St. Peter was a married man, they alleged it to be a Church tradition that he as well as the other married Apostles renounced, after their conversion, those marital relations which before their conversion they considered to be an ‘ inseparable accident ’ of conjugal life. No trace of the sacramental theory of marriage is to be found in the first two centuries. The theory only emerged in the third century, and was not formally and finally accepted as a tenet of Catholic faith until a sitting of the Council of Trent, which in the second half of the sixteenth century issued the following decree : If anyone shall say that the Church errs in teaching, according to the doctrines of the Apostles and Evangelists, that the bond of matrimony cannot be dissolved on account of the adultery of either party, and that neither, not even the innocent who has given no cause for the separation, can, while the other survives, contract a second marriage, and that adultery is com¬ mitted by the husband who divorces his wife and marries another, and by the wife who divorces her husband and marries another, such an one shall be ACCURSED. In the Latin Catechism issued by Pope Pius the Fifth pursuant to an order of this same Council (an English translation appeared in 1839) is to be found an exposition of the above tenet along with some remarkable details. The faithful are there informed not only that marriage is a Sacrament, but that our first parents were well and truly married in the Garden of Eden before they fell, ‘ prior to which event, according to the Holy Fathers, no consummation took place.’ The authors of the Catechism were apparently of opinion that such consummation was part of ‘ the fall,’ occasioned by the weakness of human nature. If this were so, it seems to follow logically that the original intention of the Creator must have been to bring humanity to a full stop after it had run for two lives, and that this intention was frustrated by the folly of a woman who succumbed to a beguiling serpent. However, in a later passage, quite inconsistent with the earlier one, we read that marriage was instituted ‘ at the beginning ’ for