And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. But in a way things are much simpler than that. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects-military, political, economic, and what not. “It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects-education, building, missions, holding services. This distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.” There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself, you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question-how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. “I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused.
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