for marriage. This device would not be in itself adequate. Indeed, nothing would be equal to the emergency but a verification of the identity of each applicant, and of the correctness of his name and address. Publication in a Government report thus based would prevent many of the now prevalent cases where some unscrupulous man or woman inveigles an innocent and ignorant person into marriage. Nor could two unscrupulous persons so easily as now obtain a marriage licence illegally.

The second cause, however, which renders inadequate the publishing of banns lies deeper. It consists in the fact that many circumstances which are not yet legal barriers to marriage ought, in the interest of the nation. at large, to be made so. Nothing has so undermined the belief in marriage as the fact that wrongs to the souls and bodies of men, constituting a national peril, are perpetrated with impunity under the sanction of legal marriage. From the point of view of health, many persons are such that whoever they marry and whatever offspring they may have are in danger of misery. Everybody who knows such facts feels that, if possible, such persons ought to be prevented from receiving the social sanction to their union. It would be possible for the State to require every medical practitioner to keep a record of all cases of illness which come under his notice; these records could be submitted to the central authorities, and thus the health-history of every individual man and woman applying for a marriage licence could be investigated, and the decision as to whether the licence should be granted could be made dependent upon the record. Moreover, every man and woman should have a right to investigate the health-history of any person who had proposed marriage to him or her.

The laws, then, must be made more rigid and dis

criminating, and this new sense of the responsibility of the community as the most interested partner in every marriage contract will be sure to find expression in the Church's solemnisation of matrimony.

There is only one other feature of the marriage ceremony as prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer which deserves our attention. After a prayer by the priest for blessing upon the bride and bridegroom there is to be said or sung either Psalm 128 or Psalm 67. It well may be that these are the most appropriate passages of a poetic nature in the Bible, where there is any reference at all that could be turned to use in a marriage ceremony. But, unless there would be some calamity attached to her seeking an appropriate lyric elsewhere, why should the Church confine herself to the Bible? There are scores of passages from the English poets far more appropriate than either Psalm 128, with its much talk about the fruitful wife and the children's children, or Psalm 67, with its chauvinistic sentiment. How much more appropriate that instead of these should be chanted James Russell Lowell's beautiful and telling lines depicting the humility, patience and sweet radiance of true love !

True love is but a humble low-born thing,

And hath its food served up in earthen ware;
It is a thing to walk with hand in hand,
Through th' everydayness of this work-day world,
Baring its tender feet to every roughness,
Yet letting not one heart-beat go astray
From beauty's law of plainness and content;
A simple fireside thing, whose quiet smile
Can warm earth's poorest hovel to a home;
Which, when our autumn cometh, as it must,
And life in th' chill wind shivers bare and leafless,
Shall still be blest with Indian-summer youth
In bleak November, and with thankful heart
Smile on its ample stores of garnered fruit,

As full of sunshine to our aged eyes

As when it nursed the blossoms of our spring.
Such is true love, which steals into the heart
With feet as silent as the lightsome dawn
That kisses smooth the rough brows of the dark,
And hath its will through blissful gentleness.

For an anthem appropriate to our conception of marriage as the sacrament of renewing life, the following magnificent lines from Swinburne could not be excelled :

With us the winds and fountains
And lightnings live in tune;
And morning-coloured mountains
That burn into the noon,

The mist's mild veil on valleys muffled from the moon:

The thunder-darkened highlands,

And lowlands hot with fruit,
Sea-bays and shoals and islands,

And cliffs that foil man's foot,

And all the flower of large-limbed life and all the root:

With us the fields and rivers,
The grass that summer thrills,
The haze where morning quivers,
The peace at heart of hills,

The sense that kindles nature, and the soul that fills;

The strife of things and beauty,
The fire and light adored,
Truth, and life-lightening duty,

Love without crown or sword,

That by his might and godhead makes man god and lord.

It would be wise for the ceremony to close with a re-assertion of the sacramental nature of marriage and the social necessity of the form to which the bride and bridegroom have submitted.

The service accordingly might finish with sentences to this effect:-"In the lives of

and

this hour will always shine supreme; it will shed a softening radiance over misfortune and add splendour to every triumph; not only because its vow possesses virtue in itself, but also because it will remain to them for ever the symbol and prototype of each new day's new plighting of love's troth."

CHAPTER XV

THE BURIAL SERVICE

THE opening rubric of the Order for the Burial of the Dead reads thus: "Here is to be noted, that the Office ensuing is not to be used for any that die unbaptised, or excommunicate, or have laid violent hands upon themselves." No one, judging from the point of view of common humanity and educational utility, can waver in the desire that the Book of Common Prayer should be revised at least to the extent of deleting this regulation. Three classes of persons are denied the privilege of receiving from the community the last marks of respect and homage, human tenderness and pity. Yet these are the very classes which the spirit of Christianity has most yearned to save, and for which, according to Christian doctrine, an infinite sacrifice was gladly made. It well may be that a separate form of burial rite, or at least one with special features of its own, should be used for each of these classes of persons, but there is no reason why they should be wholly excluded from the pale of our national humanity.

The cruelty which animated the formulation and authorisation of this rubric is so opposed to our newer humanism, that it tends to awaken in us a feeling against its authors similar to that which they undoubtedly felt