t, the State cannot remain long
untarnished. It is the holy sacrament of marriage that gives sanctity to
the family, and strength to civil society. To reject that sacrament is
to sow the seeds of revolution. Revolution in the family begets
revolution in the State. When a government, which, by its very nature,
should restrain immorality, allows the separation of man and wife, it
sanctions the right of revolution in the family, and sooner or later
that government will feel the dire effects of its own corrupt doctrine.
Now it is a matter of fact that the contempt of the marriage tie, so
prevalent in our country, is owing to Protestantism. If any one wishes
to learn how the Continental Reformers regarded the Sacrament of
Matrimony, let him read Luther's sermon on Marriage (if he can do so
without a blush), or, better still, the dogmatical judgment of Luther,
Melanchthon, Bucer, and the rest, giving permission! to the innocent
Landgrave of Hesse to commit bigamy, pure and simple.

It is the Catholic Church alone, again, that has always regarded the
Christian marriage as the corner-stone of society; and at that
corner-stone have the Popes stood guard for eighteen centuries, by
insisting that Christian marriage is one, holy, and indissoluble. Woman,
weak and unprotected, has, as the history of the Church abundantly
proves, found at Rome that guaranty which was refused her by him who had
sworn at the altar of God to love her and to cherish her till death.
Whilst, in the nations whom the Reformation of the sixteenth century
tore from the bosom of the Church, the sacred laws of matrimony are
trampled in the dust, whilst the statistics of these nations hold up to
the world the sad spectacle of divorces as numerous as marriages, of
separations of husband from wife, and wife from husband, for the most
trivial causes, thus granting to lust the widest margin of license, and
legalizing concubinage and adultery; whilst the nineteenth century
records in its annals the existence of a community of licentious
polygamists within the borders of one of the most civilized countries of
the earth, we must yet see the decree emanating from Rome that would
permit even a beggar to repudiate his lawful wife, in order to give his
affections to an adulteress.

The female portion of our race would always have sunk back into a new
slavery, had not the Popes entered the breach for the protection of the
Unity, the sanctity, the Indissolubility of matrimon