that there is no reality in a marriage persists, this is the one really decent and sufficient reason for declaring that that marriage is dissolved.  Let us have done with the infamous system now in force, by which a man and woman must commit adultery or perjury before they can get us to admit the patent fact that their marriage no longer exists as a reality.  Let us have done with a system which makes a mockery of our divorce courts.  I have the utmost sympathy with those who denounce the light way in which men and women perjure themselves to obtain release, but I affirm that the whole system is, in the main, so based on legalisms, so divorced from morality, that the resultant adulteries and perjuries are what every student of human nature must inevitably expect, however much he may regret and hate them.  It will be in vain that laws are devised to prevent divorce by collusion, in vain that King’s proctors or judges detect and penalize here and there the less wary and ingenious offenders.  The law will continue to be evaded or defied.  And the reason is fundamental:  it is that the law is not based on reality.  It affirms that a marriage still exists when it does not exist.  It demands that two human beings should give to each other what they cannot give.  And—­the essence of marriage being consent—­it makes the fact that both parties desire its dissolution the final reason for denying them!  To force a woman to demand the “restitution of conjugal rights” when such “rights” have become a horrible wrong; to compel a man to commit, or perjure himself by pretending he has committed, adultery, before he can get the State to face the fact that his marriage is no longer a reality—­is this to uphold morality?  Is this the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount?  Let us once for all abandon the pretence that all the marriages made in churches or in registrars’ offices are, therefore, necessarily made in heaven.  Let us get to work instead to see that the marriages of the future shall be made in heaven, and, above all, let us abolish the idea that a marriage is a real marriage which is based on ignorance, on fraud, on exploitation, on selfishness.  Let us not dream that we can raise our standard of morals, by affirming that every mistake that men and women make in a matter in which mistaking is so tragically easy ought to imprison them in a lie for the rest of their lives.  But let us take the ideal of Christ, in all its grandeur and all its reality, with our eyes fixed upon the ideal, but with that respect for human personality, that respect for reality and truth, which makes us refuse to accept the pretence that all the marriages we have known have been made by God.  Let us, at least, in perpetuating such blasphemies as are some of the marriages on which we have seen the blessing of the Church invoked, cease to drag in the name of Christ to the defence of a system which has laid all its weight upon a legal contract, and kept a conspiracy of silence about the sacred union of body and soul by which God makes man and woman one.