aling with parents, to hold his conviction silently? Is
it lawful either positively or by implication to lead his wife to
suppose that he shares her opinions, when in truth he rejects them?

If it were not for the maxims and practice in daily use among men
otherwise honourable, one would not suppose it possible that two answers
could be given to these questions by any one with the smallest pretence
of principle or self-respect. As it is, we all of us know men who
deliberately reject the entire Christian system, and still think it
compatible with uprightness to summon their whole establishments round
them at morning and evening, and on their knees to offer up elaborately
formulated prayers, which have just as much meaning to them as the
entrails of the sacrificial victim had to an infidel haruspex. We see
the same men diligently attending religious services; uttering assents
to confessions of which they really reject every syllable; kneeling,
rising, bowing, with deceptive solemnity; even partaking of the
sacrament with a consummate devoutness that is very edifying to all who
are not in the secret, and who do not know that they are acting a part,
and making a mock both of their own reason and their own probity, merely
to please persons whose delusions they pity and despise from the bottom
of their hearts.

On the surface there is certainly nothing to distinguish this kind of
conduct from the grossest hypocrisy. Is there anything under the surface
to relieve it from this complexion? Is there any weight in the sort of
answer which such men make to the accusation that their conformity is a
very degrading form of deceit, and a singularly mischievous kind of
treachery? Is the plea of a wish to spare mental discomfort to others an
admissible and valid plea? It seems to us to be none of these things,
and for the following among other reasons.

If a man drew his wife by lot, or by any other method over which neither
he nor she has any control, as in the case of parents, perhaps he might
with some plausibleness contend that he owed her certain limited
deferences and reserves, just as we admit that he may owe them to his
parents. But this is not the case. Marriage, in this country at least,
is the result of mutual choice. If men and women do as a matter of fact
usually make this choice hastily and on wofully imperfect information of
one another's characters, that is no warrant for a resort to unlawful
expedients to remedy the bl