Broken Family

Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced Persons? - Now that the moral sense of most people allows another trial on Love's Rialto, there are many individuals who can leave "that dead thing" to find its own grave, and in the light of some new and dearer affection go on to a renewed promise and joy of life. Can we think that wrong? Who shall dare to say that alone of all mistakes of youth, a mistaken choice in marriage shall be for all life a sentence of doom? Who shall dare to limit the power of rehabilitation of the family order, even when what has failed is the central heart of married love? Our gospel of hope and courage, and renewal of opportunity, and rebirth of affection must know no limits if we would rightly trust the spirit within our being.
But for the shallow, and the selfish, and the pleasure-seeker without reverence for the right way of life, and for the scoffer at all high moods of feeling and of ideal aim, there can be little to justify his flitting about on the very outmost limits of true love. For such, some check must be had in ordered rules and legal bonds, in order that the race-life shall go on in safety and in social health. Meanwhile, although there is much to give us pause and to demand serious study and earnest and wise social work in the situation revealed by the divorce court statistics, there is nothing that need give hysterical alarm lest the home is being destroyed and the family abolished. On the contrary, there probably was never a time when so many people were really happy, each and every member of the family, in the home relation; and hence never a time when it was clearer that to keep the home stable and permanent, and make marriage successful in the vast majority of cases, we have only to get better and wiser people in larger proportion.
To understand the real reason for marital unhappiness and for family instability, to know that such reason inheres primarily in personal character and not in any statute, is to begin