and doctrine and rule and definition--had no
attractions for him, and no terrors. He never dreamed that the Table of
Kindred and Affinity was a Third Table of the Divine Law. His appeal in
these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to "the genius
of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna."
And yet he disliked the "enfranchising measure" quite as keenly as the
clergyman who wrote to the _Guardian_ about incest, though indeed he
expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and
everywhere, he betook himself to his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical"
method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and
understood in quarters which would never have listened to arguments
from Leviticus, or fine distinctions between _malum per se_ and _malum
prohibitum_. The ground of his repugnance was primarily his strong
sense, already illustrated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the
customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won,
painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive
life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take
a step backwards into darkness and anarchy. His keen sense of moral
virtue--that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson
said, comes not of contact with evil but of repulsion from it, assured
him that the "great sexual insurrection" was not merely a grotesque
phrase, but a movement of the time which threatened national disaster,
and to which, in its most plausible manifestations, the stoutest
resistance must be offered. Here again his love of coherence and logical
symmetry, his born hatred of an anomaly, his belief in Reason as the
true guide of life, made him intolerant of all the palpably insincere
attempts to say _Thus far and no farther_. He knew that all the laws of
Affinity must stand or fall together, and that no ground in reason can
be alleged against marriage with a husband's brother which does not tell
against marriage with a wife's sister. Yet again he regarded the
proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the more
full-blooded Philistines--

Men full of meat whom wholly He abhors,[42]--

who, trying to keep a foot in each world of legality and indulgence,
sought patronage from the rich and deceived and exploited the poor.

Certainly not the least of his objections to the "enfranchising measure"
was that, in breaking down the