Beecher-tilton-woodhull

Prof. V. B. Denlsow in the Northwestern Chriatian Advocate. These three persons, wliose ñames aro now associated in the crowning scandal of the age, by a coincidence more logical than many will admit, aro all, or have been, presidents of National Woman's Rights associations. They have all entertaiued and advocated certain advanced notions of woman's freedom, very like those advanced nearly a century ago by Mary Wolstoncraft and Charles Fourier, and more recently by John Stuart Mili. How remarkable the outcroppings of uncleanness in the record of these reformers ! Mary Wolstoncraft teaches her sex to abhor marriage as a t'orm ui slavery ; and not until her third illegitimate child briugs upon the domicil of herself and her paramour tha indignation of a Brit ish mob does she consent to convert her lover into a husband - not for the sake of decency, but that she might obtain for him the protection of the law. Fourier in one sentence defines lust in a uianner that would have pleased the crude devotees of Isis and Osiris, and in the nest teaches that the secret of the future progress of the tace lies in so enlarging the freedom of man and woman that the fact of chastity shall disappear and the thought of it become ridiculous. A disciple of Fourier, Robert Dale Owen, procures, as a member of the Indiana Legislature, the passage of the " easiest" divorce law yet enacted except in Wisconsin. Tilton advocates the Wisconsin law, whereby the bond of marriage may be severed by the mere consent of the parties who make it. Mrn. Woodhull 8corns marriage and procures a divorce from the husband she professes to love, in order that she may live with two divorced husbands under the same roof, in that freer relation which Fourier advocates, called the harmonial or complex marriage. Beecher marries the wife of McFarland to the dying body of her legal seducer, the man who had ventured to address her as " my darling wife" while she was still living with her lawful huBband, as if the mummery of the marriage ceremony could cleanse their guilt. John Stuart Mili, the foremost apostle of woman's freedom, takes to himself the wife of another, who had not even been accused of unkindness toward her, for no other reason than that she in her " woman's freedom" preferred a metaphysical seducer to a Christian husband. Doubtless thero are thousands of wellmeaning ladies in the woman'a rights movement who consoientiously deny that it has any afflnity with licentiousness. It may tend, perhaps, to correct this error when they observe the three publicly elected exponeuts of the woman's rights movement cowering together under the burden of a common shame, the legitímate result of an erroneous conviction as to the relations of the sexes to acá oto er. 1 Whoever has read Tilton's pamphlet i fe of Mrs. Woodhull, wherein he extols f bat unblushing apostle of prostitution as i woman the " spotless whitenesa of whose character" was above encomium, ] must have become satisfied that however illy a man must be to write in praise of ( ;he purity of one who advocates strumpe;ry in the name of freedom, yet Tilton, j with all his brilliant powers, had shown ; ïimself to be just so silly. He could only lave done so, with any sincerity, by dopting a new definition of purity. 'his new definition Mrs. WoodhulPs ;ures, Tilton's articles on divorce, and Jeecher's example in marrying Mrs. i Tarland to the dying Richardson, all i urnish. It is that that woman is chaste whose relations with men never viólate : ;he course of her free inolination either )y continuing with one of whom she is ired, or by failing to go to one of whom he is newly enamored. Aocepting this as the new definition of chastity, Mr. ?ilton's praise, Mr. Beecher's liberality, and Mrs, Woodhull's " chastity" are alike accounted for. But with these convictions, what is ikely to be their practice 'r1 In all this ex tosure, let not Mr. Tilton for one monent suppose that he is to be vindicated. Avenged he may be. No more. He would never have placed it in the jower of Mrs. Woodhull to so employ an jquivocal and darkly hinted scandal as deeply to affect the reputation of his own wife, had not his own relations with his revelator been as unguarded as his life of Mrs. Woodhull and Mrs. Woodhull's ;ale of scandal, combined, compel us to believe. There his drama of perdition aegins. He has so often taught that if ÜEesar's wife must be above suspicion, so also must Cornelia's husband, tbat he need feel no surprise if the world is slow to sympathize with him when the adventuress whom he has publicly coinmended to the world as of " stainless purity" charges the wife whom he knows to be so, with dishonor. Again, Mr. Tilton, as an advooate of " freedom for woman" in its most odious sense, has been too sincere to feel and too logical to express, that just indignation which one, not proíeBsedly a free-lover, would have feit, upon being made the victiin of so blasting an infamy as this would have been to one who believed in the religious sanctity of marriage as a divine ordinance. A conservativo man of honor would probably have shot Beecher ; certainly would have cow-hided and exposed him. But Mr. Tilton, as an apostle of "free love" and woman's rights, was logically bound to regard the so-called " crime" as an appeal to his wife's sovereign rights over her own person in the exercise of his pastor's sovereign right to believe and practice what Tilton taught, viz : the purity of perfect freedom. Henee the secret written apology of Beecher, and the long and " chivalrous" silence of Tilton. Apart from the weak and corrupt views entertained by all these parties concerning the marriage relation, its divine sanction and its perpetuity, how has this scandal come about. Eight years ago Theodore Tilton had the finest position and roputation, for a young man, in this country or age. Me ia an orator of first-class power, a poet of real inerit, an editor of various talent. He is handsome, socially proud, and the husband of a lovely, petite, modest, accomplished wife. Mrs. Tilton is highly and most honorably conneoted - her father, the revered Judge N. B. Morse, of the Supreme Court, conservativo on all moral and religious questions, and who was, we believe, a brother of the eminent Sidney E, Morse and Prof. S. F. B. Morse. Their children are of a style of beauty at once spiritual, striking, and rare. Whoever in those years had the pleasing fortune to accept the hospitality of this brilliant man and of hig beautiful wife, must have retained forever the elightful image of that home. All that could conduce to inake home lovely was there. Eeputation, converso with noble minds such as fame draws around the hearth-stone of its fortúnate possessor, a charming companion whose very soul kindled each moment in pure worship of her admired husband, children whose smiles were like the radiance of angels' eyes when turned toward the throne of God, and the rustle of whose garmonts was graceful as the silent movements of forest birds when bathing in the holy Sabbath dawn - what more could Theodore Tilton have sought or wished. Tet, in h8 profound egotism he soug'ht martyrdom.' The martyrs only were truly great ; he would link his name with some cause to-day odious, to-morrow glorified, and so after the cross wear the crown - as did Garrison, Wilberforce Howard, and the 'rest. He advooated iniBcegenation, but nobody mobbed him. He boasted in every speech of having been mobbed in anti-slavery days. Few remembered that msb. Now, if he could but render himself odious by attacking the marriage relation, by striking a stalwart blow for woman's freedom, somebody, he sincerely hoped, would persecute him and he would be immortal ' This was his ambition. And now his martyrdom has come - all he ever sought, and, direetly, by the means he used, but of a character far more logical than he expected, the inexorable penalty due to false doctrine, the eternal cross that bears no crown save one of thorns. During those years the writer, on one occasion, by a chance question, turned the conversation upon Beecher, who was then among the daily visitors at Mr. Tilton's house. " Is Mr. Beecher's inward lifo that which it seems to those who hear him? I have been at a loss to conceive how one whose conscience is so sensitivo as Mr. Beecher's seems, should boast himself to be the happiest man living. Deep moral scnsitiveness more often makes men sad." Mr. Tilton answered, groatly to the writer's surprise : " Mr. Beecher has a keen intellectual discrimination on moral questions, but he is personally an epicure, a voluptuary, though of the most refined sort, who does nothing, not even his preacning and praying - from a sense of duty, but only tor the pleasure it affords him. It happena to make him happier to preach thau to race horses ; but if it made him happier to follow any other form of amusement, he would pursue it. Doubtless, when you heard him declare himself the happiest man living, he feit so, but scores of times has he come to this ■ house as to a den of reíuge, thrown him8elf down on that sofa and groaned in misery. You would have thought him the veriest wretch alive." "Indeed; what was the cause of his trouble ?" " It is chiefly domestic i His wife has no sympathy with his plans. She is a common place, matter-of-fact woman who ought to have wed a merchant - not ' the great Beecher.' I have had my own difficulties with hor, but those do not color my judgment. She has even followed me to the front door and ordered me out of her house, while Beecher stood at the top of the stairs and said : Theodore, whatever Mrs. Beecher says to you, remember that I am always your devoted friend." " But I am surprised that you gpeak of Beecher as a voluptuary. I had thought him too unselfish and laborious for that." " Ko ; Beecher has no unselfishness. His tastes are oesthetic and cultivated, and he is a busy man because his capacities for joyous activity are various. He enjoys pieach, editing, art, society, amusement, labor of oertain kinds, and so on. But he is & voluptuary ; he does everything that he enjoys, and only because he enjoys it. Greeley is self-sacrificing. If I want an article for the Independent Greeley will sacrifico his own ease to write it ; not because it is anything he wants to say, but because I, bis friend, need his help. Beecher never writes on that principie. He would promise the article, and, if ho found nothing more agreeable to do, he would write it ; not otherwise." " But Beecher is certainly industrious." "No! He is lazy. He accomplishes a vast amount of what from wonld require work. But he does it because in his case it only requires the vigorous play of his rersatile powers. He prepares for his sermons on Sunday morning and afteiaoon. It is not work to muse for an hour jver what oue shall say for the next bour." " But is he not charitable and genereus ?" " All in the epicurean sense. He enoys doing good, and givea as giving yields hini pleasure." Mr. Tilton was then the warm and entbusiastic friend of the great preacher whom he thus criticised. We believe ho had never formed the acquaintance of the weird sister whose utterances are " in3pired by Demosthenes." He had committed but the single error of adopting the theory that the reciprooal relations of men and women can be adj usted on the basis of equality and right, whereas nature intended them to rest on a basis of mutual inequality, inter-dependence and affection. In the very act of attempting to prove that boiling pitch is a very clean substance, snowy white and pure, he feil into the cauldron. If his catastrophe shall enable any to see in time that there is no " spotless whiteness" in those who would emancípate man or woman froin that just subjection which is implied in Christian marriage as distinguiehed from Pourieristic infidelity, that inter-sexual love, to be chaste, must be exclusive, that its so-called " freedom" is its desolation and ruin, his martyrdom will not have been in vain.