pendous compact between two human
souls; no wonder that the world, anxious to break its indissolubility,
denies its awful sacredness; no wonder that the Catholic girl enters
beneath the archway of the priest's stole[6] with the fear of great joy,
and that the Catholic bridegroom is unnerved with dread at undertaking
the responsibilities of a little universe.

We had a little chat over this matter, my curate and I, the evening
before Bittra's marriage. It came around quite naturally, for we had
been debating all kinds of possibilities as to the future; and he had
been inveighing, in his own tumultuous manner, against the new and
sacrilegious ideas that are just now being preached by the modern
apostles of free thought in novel and journal. We agreed in thinking
that the Christian ideal of marriage was nowhere so happily realized as
in Ireland, where, at least up to recent times, there was no lurid and
volcanic company-keeping before marriage, and no bitter ashes of
disappointment after; but the good mother quietly said to her child:
"Mary, go to confession to-morrow, and get out your Sunday dress. You
are to be married on Thursday evening." And Mary said: "Very well,
mother," not even asserting a faintest right to know the name of her
future spouse. But, then, by virtue of the great sacramental union, she
stepped from the position of a child and a dependent into the regal
position of queen and mistress on her own hearth. The entire authority
of the household passed thereby into her hands, as she slung the keys at
her girdle; she became bursar and _econome_ of the establishment; and in
no instance was her right to rule supreme ever questioned by husband or
child, unless drink came in to destroy this paradise, as the serpent
fouled with his slime the flowers of the garden of Eden. Married life in
Ireland has been, up to now, the most splendid refutation of all that
the world and its gospel, the novel, preach about marriage, and the
most splendid and complete justification of the supernaturalism of the
Church's dogmas and practices. But, reverting to the new phases in the
ever-shifting emotionalism of a godless world, with which marriage has
become a question of barter--a mere lot-drawing of lambs for the
shambles--he compared the happy queenly life of our Irish mother with
that of the victim of fashion, or that of uncatholic lands, where a poor
girl passes from one state of slavery to another.

"I hope," he said, "that we