Re-marriage

“ Tell me, therefore, whether you object to an immediate solemnisation of the marriage. We have been unfortunate, and recent events have drawn us from that every-day tranquillity befitting my years and infirmities. You are younger; yet I do not suppose, possessed as you are of a competent fortune, that an early marriage would at all interfere with any future plans of honour and utility that you may have formed. Do not suppose, however, that I wish to dictate happiness to you, or that a delay on your part would cause me any serious uneasiness. ”

“ Marriage by capture is an immediate expression of male force. Like marriage by settlement in the house of the wife, it is an expedient for obtaining a wife outside the group where marriage by purchase is not developed, or where the suitor cannot offer property for the bride. ”

“ Now if we admit the eternal covenant of marriage between the first pair—two immortal beings, and that they were commanded to multiply, then, if the same order of marriage is to be continued, and we become immortal, and all the man's three wives who have died in succession come up out of the grave, must he divorce all but one, or will he have them all? ”

“ As she passed into the vestry to sign the marriage register, leaning proudly upon the arm of her newly made husband, and followed by her few attending personal friends, a man who had witnessed the ceremony from behind a clustered pillar in the church, stole out into the square, his face lighted by a lurid smile, his eyes emitting the same peculiar, exultant gleam as the bride’s had done. ”

“ In talking of property, I found that Madame Evangelista gives nothing of her own to her daughter. Mademoiselle Natalie's dowry is her patrimony. Marry her, my dear boy. Men who have a name and an estate to transmit, a family to continue, must, sooner or later, end in marriage. ”

“ And it was a fact that in the higher ranks of society,—the only ones with which we are concerned,—a marriage was nothing but a contract made for political and economical reasons. The baron desired to enlarge his estate, obtain a dowry, or marry into an influential family; no one dreamed of consulting the future bride, whom marriage alone could bring into contact with people outside her own family. ”

“ Matrimony is to be the test of how we have built our castle. The success of the matrimonial venture—for every marriage is an experiment—depends absolutely upon the result of the first year. We would, therefore, seriously, and earnestly, request the young wife to think deeply upon this problem and not to ignore the fact that the success of the venture is absolutely dependent upon her efforts to a very large degree. ”

“ People would believe more simply in His ordinance, instituted “from the beginning”—not the mere outward ceremony of a wedding; but the love which draws together man and woman, until it makes them complete in one another, in the mystical marriage union, which, once perfect, should never he disannulled. ”

“ And it must be remembered that half a century ago and less you might have journeyed inquisitively through the length and breadth of that land and have found probably not one case of divorce nor of separation without divorce: among that people marriage was truly for better or for worse—a great binding and unalterable sacrament of blended lives. If after marriage love's young dream ended, then you lived on where you were—wide awake; if all gorgeous colors left the clouds and the clouds left the sky, you stood the blistering sun ”

“ On remarriage the rule is for the wife to adopt the name of the new husband, but an exception to this is tacitly recognized in the case of a title acquired by marriage when the holder remarries a commoner. ”

“ There's no talking to a young woman now about marriage, but she is all in a blaze about hearts, and darts, and—and—But hark ye, child, I'll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth—that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence—for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. ”

“ The marriage ceremony is but a mockery, if the two who exchange vows are not expecting to find their chief earthly joys in each other’s society. But when they can bring their minds to a separation of weeks or months, just for pleasure, we think they little dream of the heartaches they are laying up in store for one another. ”

“ When she has thus obtained a wife for her husband, she carries her home, puts her to bed with her husband, where, having left her, she feasts with the bride's relations. There the children of the first marriage are produced, and the men of the bride's family put each their hands upon these children's heads, and afterwards take the oath in the usual manner, to live and die with them as their own offspring. ”

“ Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that, quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient necessity for divorce. ”

“ Divorce, in its fullest interpretation;—divorce, which breaks the marriage utterly, and allows of a new choice; the children of which new choice shall be as legitimate and as capable of inheriting by succession, as the children of any other marriages,—is the established law of our land. ”

“ After all, fathers did not count in our horde. Marriage was as yet in a rude state, and couples had a way of quarrelling and separating. Modern man, what of his divorce institution, does the same thing legally. ”

“ The precise form of the ceremony of marriage is not the important thing, but the fact of some form which will make marriage more or less binding, binding enough to compel the fulfillment of the obligations which follow from it, which are inherent in it and inseparable from it. ”

“ The ancient marriage, and indeed the medieval one, and the marriage of our own grandmother's time began with submission and usually ended with subjection. But the modern marriage at its best is a spiritual and material partnership. It is the modern marriage at its best and otherwise with which we have to do. ”

“ After providing for sickness and death, a family must lay aside the sum necessary to secure an advantageous marriage for the daughter, and to meet her family's share of the wedding. Similarly, the young man anticipates marriage as a natural development in his life. ”

“ There is the mariage de convenance, and the marriage by entail, and there is the runaway marriage which is the most illustrious of all. The first is a family arrangement between the parents in which the parties most interested have no voice, though they render their lives forfeit if they do not carry out the domestic contract.
A settler told me that he and his wife had had a native girl in their service for two years, when one day her affianced husband appeared at the door to claim his bride. ”

“ When the marriage is consummated, I shall have a more noble lord than I deserve." They all say: "If you are prudent, this very day shall not go by without the marriage being solemnised. For it is folly to postpone for a single hour an advantageous act." ”

“ Theodore
Come now, simply because many young people rush into marriage without thinking—
Lucy
Simply because these New Women—
John
Simply because one marriage in a thousand ends in divorce—
[Pg 56]
Helen
Wait!... One in a thousand? Dear me, what an idealist you are, John! In America, one marriage in every eleven now ends in divorce. ”

“ The first great marriage celebrated in this world of ours—that of our first parents—is a sample of marriage that should be introduced and practiced by and among all generations and nations, so far as the eternity of its duration is concerned. ”

“ But marriage, with all its accompanying conventions and indissoluble bonds—indissoluble, except through the loathsome medium of the divorce court—was a condition of life that his whole nature shrank from. ”

“ The old manus-marriage certainly supposes great confidence of the wife and her parents in the fidelity of the husband, while the marriage law of the time of the emperors relating to estates never lost sight of the possibility of divorce. ”

“ Before the whole Council of State the First Consul pronounced the following startling phrase, in which he at the same time eulogized and satirized marriage, and summed up the contents of this book:
"If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!" ”

“ I am very young, but not as young as
that; and as the Princess comes of age at two tomorrow, why at
two to-morrow I'm a free man, so I appointed that hour for our
wedding, as I shall like to have as much marriage as I can get
for my money.
BAR. I see. Of course, if the married state is a happy
state, it's a pity to waste any of it. ”

“ This feeling, as Sir Henry Maine remarks, is the principal source of those habits of saving and hoarding, which characterize the French people, and is probably descended, by a long chain of succession, from the obligatory provisions of the marriage law of the Emperor Augustus.2526
In this course of development, the marriage portion has often become something quite different from what it was originally. It has in many cases become a purchase-sum by means of which a father buys a husband for his daughter, as formerly a man bought a wife from her father. ”

“ It seems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage that remains childless, to let it expire at the end of three or four or five unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right of the husband and wife to marry each other again. ”

“ Marriage was said not to be a binding tie, but only a knot out of which you could slip at any time. With such views of the highest and holiest relationship in life, with divorce easy, and polygamy rampant, the condition of society may be better imagined than described. ”

“ John
You mean, they'll come in, be respectable? [Pg 206]
Judge
Admit that marriage has numerous drawbacks—and they'll see its advantages. Deny it—and they'll see nothing but each other. Marriage is in a bad way, but it's the less of two evils. Marriage must adjust itself to the New Woman—but the New Woman must meanwhile adjust herself to marriage. [Briskly to Lucy.] Now, then, did you send out that hurry call for the family this evening?
Lucy
Yes, they're on their way here now, but Uncle Everett, Doctor Hamilton said, next week. ”

“ If the widow remarrying is a minor whose marriage has not been consummated, she shall not remarry without the consent of her father, or, if she has no father, of her paternal grand-father, or, if she has no such grand-father, of her mother, or failing all these, of her elder brother, or, failing also brothers, of her next male relative. ”

“ Amongst other discourses one day I told him, I was much affected with the relation I had from some of the company of their custom in holding the feast of the family, for that, methought, I had never heard of a solemnity wherein Nature did so much preside. And because propagation of families proceedeth from the nuptial copulation, I desired to know of him what laws and customs they had concerning marriage, and whether they kept marriage well, and whether they were tied to one wife? ”

“ The same God that originated marriage for all eternity, in relation to the first pair, has again spoken from the heavens and told us something about this sacred ceremony. He has informed us that if we are married and expect to have claim on our wives, and wives on their husbands, in the eternal worlds, that this ordinance of marriage must be, not till death, but for ever and ever, reaching forward through all our future state of existence. ”

“ Matrimony is a solemn Work, 'tis proposed as a sacred Institution, and the conjugal State is, upon all Occasions, look'd upon, by those that confider and understand it, as a kind of Civil Establishment in life; to engage in it Rashly, and without Consideration, is perfectly inconsistent with the Nature of the Thing, and with all that is proposed in it, or expected from it, at least by wife and sober People. ”

“ Or, if there are grown-up boys or girls in a family, who remain unmarried, the parents celebrate the marriage ceremony between a pair of figurines, in the hope that the marriage of their children will speedily follow. ”

“ Gossipings, weddings, lykewakes, were, especially in our Imperial Cities, privileged vehicles for carrying on soft secrets, and expediting marriage contracts; hence the old proverb, One wedding makes a score. But a poor runagate no man desired to number among his baptismal relatives ”

“ In regard to marriage, as with all the other traditional bonds between human beings, a very extraordinary change is taking place, wholly inevitable, wholly necessary as a stage in the development of a new life, but by no means wholly satisfactory until it is completed. All the traditional bonds were based on authority—of the king, the feudal baron, the priest, the father, the husband. ”

“ you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"
"Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it." ”

“ But when it comes to marriage pertaining to a couple, neither of whom has ever been married before, the Lord has ordained that that marriage, if performed according to his law, by divine authority and appointment, shall have effect after the resurrection from the dead, and shall continue in force from that time throughout all the ages of eternity. ”