Note 122 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
I have borrowed these sentences, and almost all the information contained in these paragraphs, from a Paper in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ Jan., 1862. The reader will readily recognize the master-hand in that admirable article. It is amusing, however, to see in it what a poor halfpenny-worth there is of bread (monogamy) to an intolerable deal of sack (polygamy). Whilst pages 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 are devoted to showing that polygamy was a Mosaic institution, unforbidden to the early Christians, and only rendered restrictive and penal—principally by the Church of Rome—in modern times, a single sentence informs us that the settlement of the question was left to old Roman laws, to German manners, and to ‘the silent but absolute operation of a religion, based on the sentiments with which no system of polygamy seems to be compatible—freedom and love.’
An eminent Moslem divine—El Siyuti, I think—wrote a Moslem treatise on what to avoid. Through some three hundred pages he indulges his reader with a full description of the most voluptuous practices of the East—a perfect worship of Bacchus and Venus. In the last he perorates, beginning—‘This much, O reader, have I recounted unto thee, so that thou mayest know the things forbidden unto thee,’ &c., &c.
With respect to the reviewer’s last assertion, viz., that Christianity is based upon freedom and love—I doubt that the monogamic sentiment was ever intended by it. And I doubt even more vehemently whether the mixture of sentiment and passion, which we know by that name, has not added to the miseries rather than conduced to the happiness of human life. In my humble opinion, it is not one of the least merits of polygamy that it abstracts from the parents an affection which it bestows upon the progeny. As no man, it is said, can serve God and Mammon, so no woman can equally love husband and children; even the same woman, at different periods of her existence, will prefer one to the detriment of the other. And whilst conjugal love contains the base alloy of sexual feeling, parental affection is of all the most pure and holy. The unselfish will find no difficulty in pointing out which to prefer.