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    engagement . The quakers indeed have long borne their testimony , but the world goes not to quaker meetings to see the simplicity of their arrangements . Few people know , perhaps , that quaker marriages always may , and often do take place ,

    without any religious service , any prayer or admonition whatever , or the interposition of any person except the two parties concerned . They rise , and in the simplest form of words pledge themselves to each other ; and those present who are disposed , sign the record as witnesses , and there is an end of the matter ,

    unless any brother or sister feels that impulse to speak , which they obey on this as they do on all other occasions , when it is felt . But though the Friends shrink not from publicity , and in truth they have as little occasion to do so as most people , still as to the mass of the community these things are done in a corner . It will be very different when the multifarious hosts of dissent , the three denominations which are known at court , and the three hundred

    denominations which are not known at court , with all their young men and maidens , shall be marrying themselves all the country over . They will make themselves seen and heard , and the church men and church women will take turn to feel that theirs is an aggrieved denomination ; and they will petition Parliament for equal rights , and the dissenting principle will become the established principle , and in its developements and its applications it

    may be that alleviations or a cure may be found for evils by which society is now both harassed and contaminated . For certain it is that our present system does not work well , J [ n many cases parties are inexorably bound together for life t > y the law , and by those anomalous relics of popery the ecclesiastical courts , who are neither one flesh nor one spirit , but , morally speaking , divorced , and without affection , if they live together , living

    together viciously . In many other cases , the institution fails of realizing any approach towards that sympathy , solace , stimulus to honourable action , and moral training of the rising race , which are its proper and professed objects . Moreover , the streets of all large cities swarm with unhappy women , miserable agents of the temptation of which at first they were the victims , alike suffering and corrupting , and visiting on the other sex an involuntary but fearful retaliation for their own ruin . Now if the principle that

    marriage is a common contract , a simple agreement , were consistently followed out , one result would be that law and fact would cease to be at variance , and parties to be condemned to wretched lives of unwilling falsehood . A civil contract , not dissoluble when its dissolution is required by the interests of the contracting

    parties and of the community , would be a strange anomaly . Some of the American States have got rid of that anomaly , and we can scarcely throw stones at them on account either of their immorality or unhappiness . There never would have been any doubt on this matter , but for priests alike ignorant and meddling ,

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    The Dissenting Marriage Question . 141

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1833, page 141, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2608/page/73/