A marriage of this kind, so solemn and so sacramental, cannot in the lifetime of its partakers be severed or dissolved. Only the will of God, executed by the cold scythe of Death, can grant a divorce. Until death come, the pair is inevitably joined, to labour and pray together, and to engender and bear the children who in time shall release their parents’ souls from the purgatory of unfulfilled duties. The Hindu theory is a deduction from two principles, one, the unreality of individual appearance, the second, the unworthiness of sensuous illusion. Marriage is a union of ephemeral beings for the sake of family and community, and for the attainment of a worshipful elevation over sense and the world of illusion. It is at once a consecration and an initiation. The absence of that strong sexual passion which we have clad in the jewelled veils of poetry and have baptized in the romantic waters of love is not to the Brahman eye an impediment or a disappointment. At the most the hope is for an ordered affection and a disciplined devotion. But the facts of human nature cannot with impunity be ignored. Ideals based on a non-natural order of things may inspire noble poetry: but they must fail when they are applied to large bodies of men and women. Contracts founded upon causes and effects that are traced by reason can be applied without much hindrance and at any rate without hypocrisy by all those who can recognize facts. But there are few who are worthy of or can benefit by a sacrament. The Hindu spirit has created splendid images and has embodied in literature the characters of Sita and of Damyanti, the wife who is all devotion and sacrifice, nobly courageous, nobly patient. But, by its very distance from actuality, it leads in the practice of every day to great hypocrisy and unnecessary hardship. The danger has been foreseen by the lawgivers themselves: and they have not dared to apply their ideal, even in theory, to others than the highest castes of the hierarchy. For the warrior, the cultivator, and the menial classes they have allowed different practices and divergent ideals. Even in the practice of those Brahmans, to whom the system should apply in its entirety, considerable concessions have been authorized. In the unauthorized acts of every day life there are even greater deviations. In one sense, of course, it may be said that the theory of the highest Hinduism in regard to marriage is one and indivisible; but marriage is, after all, the concrete contact and companionship of a living, feeling man and woman, and the application of the theory an affair of national character. Race and climate and the influences of history have played their part in the Indian Continent at least as much as in other regions of equal area. Even in the priestly Brahman caste, the Brahman of the Deccan is as different from him of the Punjáb as an Italian Marchese could be from a Prussian Graf. They come from different strains, they live in different surroundings: