best to make this
relationship a failure, surely it is worth while, at least, to try what
knowledge, and understanding, and education, and training _can_ do. We
cannot know all. That is no reason why we should not know all that we can.

Surely marriage must be a divine institution, since we have done so much
to make it a failure, and yet one sees again and again such splendid love,
such magnificent loyalty and faith! "You advocate," someone wrote to me the
other day, "you advocate that people should leave each other when they are
tired of each other." No, I do not advocate that anyone should accept
a failure. I advocate that every human being should do all that is
possible--more perhaps than is possible without the grace of God--to
make marriage the noble and lovely thing it should be. I think those are
faint-hearted who easily accept the fact that it is difficult, and from
that drift swiftly to the conclusion that for them it is impossible. I
advocate that the greatest faith and loyalty should be practised. I believe
in my heart that there is perhaps no relationship which cannot be redeemed
by the love and devotion and the grace of God in the hearts of those who
seek to make it redeemable. What I do say is that in Church and State we
should concentrate all our efforts on helping men and women to a wise,
enlightened, noble conception of marriage before they enter upon it, and
not on a futile and immoral attempt to hold them together by a mere legal
contract when all that made it valid has fled.

I believe that the more one knows of human nature the more one reverences
it. I believe that the vast majority of human beings strain every nerve
rather than fail in so great a responsibility. Do you remember reading in
Mr. Bertrand Russell's book, "Principles of Social Reconstruction," of
a little church of which it was discovered, not, I think, very long
ago, that, owing to some defect in its title, marriages which had been
celebrated there were not legal? Mr. Bertrand Russell says that there were
at that time I forget how many couples still living who had been married
in that church, who found that, by this legal defect, they were not legally
bound. Do you know how many of those married people seized the opportunity
to desert each other and go and marry somebody else? Not a single one!
Every one of those couples went quietly away to church and got married
again!

Religious people do sometimes think such mean things of human