do as a matter of fact usually make this choice hastily and on wofully imperfect information of one another’s characters, that is no warrant for a resort to unlawful expedients to remedy the blunder.  If a woman cares ardently enough about religion to feel keen distress at the idea of dissent from it on the part of those closely connected with her, she surely may be expected to take reasonable pains to ascertain beforehand the religious attitude of one with whom she is about to unite herself for life.  On the other hand, if a man sets any value on his own opinions, if they are in any real sense a part of himself, he must be guilty of something like deliberate and systematic duplicity during the acquaintance preceding marriage, if his dissent has remained unsuspected.  Certainly if men go through society before marriage under false colours, and feign beliefs which they do not hold, they have only themselves to thank for the degradation of having to keep up the imposture afterwards.  Suppose a protestant were to pass himself off for a catholic because he happened to meet a catholic lady whom he desired to marry.  Everybody would agree in calling such a man by a very harsh name.  It is hard to see why a freethinker, who by reticence and conformity passes himself off for a believer, should be more leniently judged.  The differences between a catholic and a protestant are assuredly not any greater than those between a believer and an unbeliever.  We all admit the baseness of dissimulation in the former case.  Why is it any less base in the latter?

Marriages, however, are often made in haste, or heedlessly, or early in life, before either man or woman has come to feel very deeply about religion either one way or another.  The woman does not know how much she will need religion, nor what comfort it may bring to her.  The man does not know all the objections to it which may disclose themselves to his understanding as the years ripen.  There is always at work that most unfortunate maxim, tacitly held and acted upon in ninety-nine marriages out of a hundred, that money is of importance, and social position is of importance, and good connections are of importance, and health and manners and comely looks, and that the only thing which is of no importance whatever is opinion and intellectual quality and temper.  Now granting that both man and woman are indifferent at the time of their union, is that any reason why upon either of them acquiring serious convictions, the other should be expected, out of mere complaisance, to make a false and hypocritical pretence of sharing them?  To see how flimsy is this plea of fearing to give pain to the religious sensitiveness of women, we have only to imagine one or two cases which go beyond the common experience, yet which ought not to strain the plea, if it be valid.