The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

CANONICITY
the pages of the Bible. Our Lord teaches us that next
to the duty of love to God comes that of love to one's
neighbour. But a man's nearest neighbour is his wife.
Therefore after his God his wife has the first claim
upon him. But the whole conception of matrimonial
duty rests on the idea of constancy in the love of man
and woman.
If this book had been read in its literal signification
and its wholesome lesson absorbed b}' Christendom in
the Middle Ages, the gloomy cloud of asceticism that
then hung over the Church would have been somewhat
lightened, not to give place to the outburst of
licentiousness that accompanied the Renaissance^ but
rather to allow of the better establishment of the
Christian home. The absurd legends that follow the
names of St. Anthony and St. Dunstan would have
lost their motive. Hildebrand would have had no
occasion to hurl his thunderbolt. The Church was
making the huge mistake of teaching that the remedy
for dissoluteness was unnatural cehbacy. This book
taught the lesson— truer to nature, truer to experience,
truer to the God who made us—that it was to be found
in the redemption of love.
Can it be denied that the same lesson is needed in
our own day ? The realism that has made itself a
master of a large part of popular literature reveals a
state of society that perpetuates the manners of the
court of Solomon, though under a thin veil of decorum.
The remedy for the awful dissoluteness of large portions
of society can only be found in the cultivation of such
lofty ideas on the relation of the sexes that this abomi-
nation shall be scouted with horror. It is neither
necessary, nor right, nor possible to contradict nature.
What has to be shewn is that man's true nature is not