The third great evil which has made the most fearful inroad among us, so as already to have extorted many a warning cry, is _the contempt of the marriage tie_. The family, as I have said in a previous chapter, is the groundwork of civil society. If the family be Christian, the State will also be Christian; and if the family be corrupt, 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.