Religion: Of True Minds

Eager always to jeer at new things of which they know nothing, stupid persons and headline writers have had a merry time over “companionate marriage.* In the meantime, famed Benjamin Barr Lindsey, of Denver, onetime judge of the Juvenile Court, continues to preach, solemnly and with efficacy, his system of practical ethics, hoping eventually to obtain legislation that will make it practicable. He so preached last week in St. Louis, where an audience at the Coliseum heard him debate against jovial Lawrence McDaniel, a onetime Circuit Attorney.

Judge Lindsey’s opponent, like many another, refused to take Mr. Lindsey’s arguments with a grain of sense. He made irrelevant jokes which amused the crowd, as: “I have read Judge Lindsey’s book three times and I don’t know yet just what this companionate marriage is. It sounds like trial marriage to me. No one knows better than I that all marriages are trials. . . . You know, our poor benighted parents didn’t believe in this birth control. If they had, we wouldn’t be here tonight debating whether or not we should believe in it. . . .”

Mr. Lindsey frowned at these flippancies. He said: “My opponent knows he has a weak case so he jokes with the jury. . . . Let us have done with lies and hypocrisy. Ninety per cent of married people practice birth control. Let us legalize it and get away from the bootlegged devices of the corner drug store. … I am not for free love. . . . The companionate marriage is real marriage. It will put an end to the immorality of the present day and correct the divorce evil. Young people with the fear of children removed can marry earlier. They can have children when they want them. . . .”

When the debate was over, a woman got up on the floor and made incredibly idiotic remarks. A young Catholic heckled the judge into issuing a defiance of Rome. Then the audience voted 505 to 137 that Lindsey had won the debate. Said Mr. McDaniel: “You can’t get some people to laugh anything off. . . .”

Waves of reform often stir a froth of laughter as they move forward. Lindsey’s reform can be criticized in that it seeks to remove immorality by changing morality; also it can be said that, to most people, the two indispensable adjuncts of matrimony are child bearing and the permanence which springs from it, neither of which the companionate theory emphasizes.

Lacking these two essentials, companionate marriage must be technically regarded as a form of courtship. Nor does this detract from its possible value. Sexual experience in courtship is looked upon by many modern moralists with the utmost disapproval; even “necking,” they think, is disgraceful. Other moralists have defended premarital sexual experience of a more or less complete nature. More primitive people, in various ways, have practiced it. Recent “puritanical” criticism of companionate marriage has stimulated interest in a strange pastime, widely practiced among the early inhabitants of New England and known as

Bundling. The winters about Cape Cod are cold and the evenings, in the epoch before the mightiest minds were turned to providing parlor entertainment, long and uninteresting. Young sparks also were compelled to walk the long miles that lay between their cottages and those of their well-beloveds. Arriving tired and cold, they sought some warmer, some sprightlier diversion than sofa sitting in a chilly chamber. Bundling was invented for their convenience. It consisted of putting girl and boy into neat, warm, supposedly secure garments and tucking them into bed, where they might lie, talking or drowsing through the winter evenings. The practice was regarded as an incentive to lawful matrimony; never was it considered in the least immoral. Later, however, the game was regarded as a trifle vulgar: from the latter part of the 18th Century it suffered a gradual decline.

*In its essence, companionate marriage is merely marriage without the expectation, immediate or otherwise, of propagation and with the possibility of divorce by mutual consent. Its adherents suggest legalized birth control, more complete sexual education for boys and girls.