Breach of promise of marriage

“ Did a person ever change his course out of respect to his marriage vows? I do not mean his marriage or the marriage ceremony, but simply the promises: to love, honor, and cherish on the one side; to love, honor, and obey on the other. Did a man’s promise ever fetter his tongue from uttering the harsh word? Did a woman’s promise ever induce her to heed her husband’s wishes? I trow not. The honor and love which a husband or wife do not spontaneously render, they will seldom render for a vow. If the vital spark of heavenly flame remains, the promise is of no use. ”

“ Divorce I hold a shameful blot on true womanhood, a menace to domestic and national morality, an insult to the Lord. Human law can no more annul my marriage than my baptismal vow; neither was made to man ”

“ No suit for breach of promise could be ever brought against one of them—for such is the non-committalism of their incoherency, that no woman, on her oath, could avow, even were they conjugated at the time, that he ever asked her to marry him ”

“ Is it possible for a responsible man of a serious turn of mind and a true Christian to care for the love of his wife? ... If the husband seeking divorce, or the wife seeking separation, alleges the refusal of the conjugal right, then, of course, there is a legitimate reason for a rupture, for the service for which the marriage is granted has not been carried out. ”

“ And she may be thankful that she will be able to marry as soon as the divorce is absolute. In some States the person against whom a divorce is granted, is forbidden to marry altogether, or for a period of years as a punishment. To forbid marriage altogether, in such cases, appears to me another premium on immorality. ”

“ He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. ”

“ However much men may differ in their views of the nature and attributes of the matrimonial contract, and in their concept of the rights and obligations of the marriage state, no one will deny that these are grave questions; since upon marriage rests the family, and upon the family rest society, civilization, and the highest interests of religion and the state. Yet, strange to say, divorce, the deadly enemy of marriage, stalks abroad to-day bold and unblushing, a monster licensed by the laws of Christian states to break hearts, wreck homes and ruin souls. ”

“ One of the most barbarous rules of a male society was preserved by the Act, and while a man was permitted to divorce his wife for a single act of infidelity, a woman could only divorce her husband if he were also guilty of cruelty or desertion. ”

“ THE worst of our social evils, personal wrongs, and political sins arise from the ununiform operation of our marriage and divorce laws. The loose manner in which a contract of marriage may he entered into and the reckless facility with which a marriage contract may be dissolved are a disgrace to our high civilization and professed Christianity. ”

“ When this hideous divorce is got, and our beautiful marriage has been undone, any other woman in the world might hope to win his love. I shall be the one free woman on earth to whom that hope would be shame and outrage and humiliation. ”

“ The unfortunate girl is still innocent; she may yet become a faithful wife, a tender mother, and, if the past is mantled in clouds, the future is blue as the clear sky. Shall we not find these tender tints in the gloomy pictures of loves which violate the marriage law? In the one, the woman is the victim, in the other, she is a criminal. What hope is there for the unfaithful wife? If God pardons the fault, the most exemplary life cannot efface, here below, its living consequences. ”

“ The undoubted iniquity of our existing marriage laws is always spoken of as an injustice to the woman and the changes in the direction of greater freedom which are advocated as a relief to the wife bound to a bad or otherwise unendurable husband. ”

“ It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony. It is our opponents, and not we, who hope to be saved by the letter of ritual, instead of the spirit of reality. It is they who hold that vow or violation, loyalty or disloyalty, can all be disposed of by a mysterious and magic rite, performed first in a law-court and then in a church or a registry office. ”

“ I see you are to have a Conference on your Divorce Laws—that opinion and indignation are rising. For Heaven's sake, do something! I gather some appalling facts from a recent Washington report. One in twelve of all your marriages dissolved! A man or a woman divorced in one state, and still bound in another! The most trivial causes for the break-up of marriage, accepted and acted upon by corrupt courts, and reform blocked by a phalanx of corrupt interests! ”

“ John, editor of the Prose Works of Milton, remarks in reference to the marriage law as it now stands in England:—
"Having been invented and established by men, it is calculated to bear with extreme severity on women, who are daily subjected to wrongs and hardships which they would not endure, were the relief of divorce open to them. Those who take a different view descant upon the encouragement which would, they say, be given to immorality were divorce made easy. ”

“ If a wife owes no duty to her husband because the husband has violated the contract, and has even assaulted her life, is it possible for her to feel toward him any real thrill of affection? If she does not, what is there left of marriage? What part of this contract or sacrament remains in living force? She can not sustain the relation of wife, because she abhors him; she cannot remain under the same roof, for fear that she may be killed. They sustain, then, only the relations of hunter and hunted—of tyrant and victim. ”

“ Or let us assume that the husband sues for divorce on the plea that his wife does not love him. If she admits the plea, the state must grant the divorce; for love only is the ground of a legal marriage, and where there is no love the relation is merely a concubinage. What reasons could a woman have, indeed, to continue to live with a man whom she confessedly did not love? These reasons could only be of an external character, and the man can not allow himself to be made their tool. ”

“ And passing strange is it, too, that so many, wise and far-seeing in less weighty concerns, do not appear to see in the evergrowing power of divorce a menace not only to the sacredness of the marriage institution, but even to the fair social fabric reared upon matrimony as its corner-stone. ”

“ I should be recreant to the duty I owe to society, if I failed to call your serious attention to the sad and immoral effects growing out of the readiness with which our legislative assemblies have heretofore annulled that most solemn contract of marriage. Let me earnestly invoke you to stay the evils, which result from the legislature granting divorces, thereby destroying the sacred responsibilities and duties of husband and wife merely upon the request, or petition, of one of the parties. ”

“ If they be right—and I suspect they are—we have made a famous blunder by our late legislation about divorce. Of all the crafts that ever were launched, marriage is one from which fewest facilities of desertion should be provided. ”

“ Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse than those which marriage has produced and still produces—marriage, which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless traffic, the most agonising soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties, and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern life can show. ”

“ As Marriage is the very Basis, Foundation, and Cement of Society, an Institution of God, and productive of the greatest Blessings in human Life, 'tis highly reasonable to guard it with such Laws, that those who turn it into a Plague and a Curse, might receive due Punishment for such enormous Transgressions!
If there are any Laws which empower a Woman to ruin or oppress her Husband, you have the Power in your own Hands ”

“ There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion, the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his property. ”

“ This is a strange coincidence, Constance. I have been face to face with this same issue for the past fortnight. My daughter has begun divorce proceedings against her husband in order to marry again. They simply were tired of each other; that is the true, flippant reason they are separating. Each is to marry someone else. Her light view of the marriage relation has almost broken my heart. And what is to blame? The low standard of society in respect to the sacredness of the marriage tie. ”

“ We ought publicly to declare invalid the vows of lovers, and to refuse them permission to marry: and this because we should treat marriage itself much more seriously, so that in cases where it is now contracted it would not usually be allowed in future! Are not the majority of marriages such that we should not care to have them witnessed by a third party? ”

“ We cannot fail to realize as we grasp the nature and direction of the modern movement of divorce that the final tendency of that movement is to efface itself. Necessary as the Divorce Court has been as the inevitable corollary of an impossible ecclesiastical conception of marriage, no institution is now more hideous, more alien to the instinctive feelings generated by a fine civilization, and more opposed to the dignity of womanhood. ”

“ For what could be more maddening than an existence in which our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial composure of custom?
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. ”

“ And of that emotional situation you can make nothing but a tragedy, whichever way you turn it. With or without marriage, with or without divorce, with or without any arrangements that anybody can suggest or imagine, it remains a tragedy. The only difference is that by the doctrine of marriage it remains both a noble and a fruitful tragedy; like that of a man who falls fighting for his country, or dies testifying to the truth. ”

“ Those who trust only in compulsion to restrain a man’s desire to desert his wife, forget to what a degree spiritual influences have even now facilitated divorce, in spite of the coercive law. One seldom finds in our day a high-minded husband or wife who insists on retaining the other against his or her will, except when it is clear to one partner that divorce, if conceded, would result in the certain ruin of the other. ”

“ Also such a Promise, especially if made before Witness, will be, and frequently is admitted as a lawful Obstacle or Impediment, why a Person under such an Obligation should not be allowed to marry any other; nay farther, the Person claiming by Virtue of such a Promise, may forbid the Bans, as we call it ”

“ In the great confusion of opinions, however, which day by day is spreading more and more widely, it should further be known that no power can dissolve the bond of Christian marriage whenever this has been ratified and consummated; and that, of a consequence, those husbands and wives are guilty of a manifest crime who plan, for whatever reason, to be united in a second marriage before the first one has been ended by death. ”

“ The Independent, a Protestant religious paper, sneers at all barriers to divorce, Catholic, Protestant, or civil, as “shallow,” and declares that “no matter with what solemn ceremony the twain may have been made one, yet when love departs, then marriage ceases and divorce begins.”
A certain unhappy section of those waifs of womanhood, the advocates of woman's rights, is known as the champion of “free-love,” that is, in plain words, adultery. ”

“ A pundit of the belief will argue that the practical reason for prohibiting remarriage is to prevent the crowding of the marriage market—and this is the only "reason" that can be extracted from one claiming to speak with knowledge on the unfortunate subject. ”

“ Forgiveness is no word for such lips as yours, Lady Kingsland! Keep your guilty secret, or your father's or your mother's, whosoever it may be; but not as my wife! No, madame! when the world begins to point the finger of scorn, through her own evil-doing, at the woman I have married, then from that hour she is no longer my wife. The law of divorce shall free you and your secrets together; but until that freedom comes, I command you to meet this man no more! On your peril you write to him, or speak to him, or meet him again. If you do, by the living Lord, I will murder you both! ”