human
Hello! he cried.
gpt
Thought you were lost and been hunting all over the place for you.
human
My poor little woman, where have you been, and what have they been doing to you?
gpt
It's all my fault,
human
I knew perfectly what the attitude of the Church would be, and I ought to have warned you.
gpt
Poor old Father Dan! He's an old angel, with as good a heart as ever beat under a cassock. But what a slave a man may be to the fetish of his faith! Only think what he says, my darling! The guilty party! I'll never believe you are the guilty party, but consider! The guilty party may never marry! No good clergyman of any Christian Church in the world dare marry her! What an infamy! Ask yourself what the churches are here for. Aren't they here to bring salvation to the worst of sinners? Yet they cast out the woman who has sinned against her marriage vow--denying her access to the altar and turning her out of doors--though she may have repented a thousand times, with bitter, bitter tears!
human
But that's not your case, anyway, he said.
gpt
Father Dan knows perfectly that your marriage was no marriage at all--only a sordid bit of commercial bargaining, in which your husband gave you his bad name for your father's unclean money. It was no marriage in any other sense either, and might have been annulled if there had been any common honesty in annulment. And now that it has tumbled to wreck and ruin, as anybody might have seen it would do, you are told that you are bound to it to the last day and hour of your life! After all you have gone through--all you have suffered--never to know another hour of happiness as long as you live! While your husband, notwithstanding his brutalities and infidelities, is free to do what he likes, to marry whom he pleases! How stupid! How disgusting! how damnable!
human
Oh, I know what they'll say. It will be the old, old song, 'Whom God hath joined together.' That's what this old Church of ours has been saying for centuries to poor women with broken hearts. Has the Church itself got a heart to break? No--nothing but its cast-iron laws which have been broken a thousand times and nobody a penny the worse.
gpt
But I wonder, he continued,
human
I wonder why these churchmen, who would talk about the impossibility of putting asunder those whom God has joined together, don't begin by asking themselves how and when and where God joins them. Is it in church, when they stand before the altar and are asked a few questions, and give a few answers? If so, then God is responsible for some of the most shocking transactions that ever disgraced humanity--all the pride and vanity and deliberate concubinage that have covered themselves in every age, and are covering themselves still, with the cloak of marriage.
gpt
But no, said Martin,
human
Mary, he said, in his passionate voice,