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Show REV. FATHER VAUGHAN SCORES SOCIETY GIRLS The Distinguished English Priest Denounces De-nounces Leasehold Marriages and Shrinking of Duties of Motherhood. Father Bernard Vaughan continued his series of discourses on the married state for a crowded and fashionable congregation at the Church of the Immaculate Im-maculate Conception. He condemned the advocates of what he described as a "leasehold marriage," and reproved society ladies for shirking the duties of dear motherhood. "The are those." said Father Vaughan, "who contend that married life should continue to bind till some danger in it is reached, while others want to make it a sort of partnership which ought to be as easily broken as it is started. They are advocates for the leasehold marriage, or, in other words, for free love." From some fake philosophy some people, peo-ple, the preacher observed, were regarding regard-ing marriage as a mere social contract, which ought by a mutual arrangement to be easily dissolved. If marriage were nothing more than social or civil contract, he saw no reason why it should not be dissolved, like any other business transaction. But was it? Was not marriage something much higher, more intimate, a natural contract con-tract to start "with, and a supernatural contract by the law of Christ? The very terms upon which the parties pledge themselves at the altar provided i beyond question that matrimony was something divine which God had set up, for his own purposes. "So clear was this," Father Vaughan averred, "that if any bride and bridegroom bride-groom were to substitute for the terms 'till death do us part' some phrase as 'till we make other arrangements,' or 'till we come to grow tired of each other,' or 'till we wish for some alli ance,' a marriage would be regarded as no real marriage at all. It would be a sort of blasphemous concubinage, and they would know it." Referring to a question which had been very recently put to him as to whether there were any circumstances which made perfectly right for a man and wife to seek legal separation, but the marriage tie still held them. They could not enter into another marriage. "It cannot be," he said, "because Christ cannot blow hot and cold and contradict contra-dict Himself in the same breath. "There is no greater plague upon this earth today," Father Vaughan declared, "than the way in which people are changing matrimony. God made it a holy alliance in which men and women should come together and supply each other's deficiencies, so that they might develop patience and exercises of virtue and of noble life. But they who live for the riot of sense and for the pleasure pleas-ure of the hour, and to gratify their passions, of course will not listen to God. "When we hear of wives today saying that they refuse altogether the privileges privi-leges of motherhood, because they can not be bored with the nursery, because their fiat is too small or because they are not strong enough to bear what they don't like: when wives speak thus and speak thus openly and boastingly in their boudoirs, in their drawing rooms, and in the public parks, it is time to read the riot act. For they are boastingly profaning the laws of God, and desecrating their sacred state of life." Canadian Freeman. |