p. 3 | The Divorce Evil

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 16, 1903

The Divorce Evil

SPEAKING to the graduating class of Vassar College, Hon. Whitelaw Reid touched as follows on the subject of the menace to society from the divorce evil, which he hoped the influence of educated women would be able to check:—

When higher ideals do return, the powerful influence of educated women surely will array, as never before, the best of their sex in compact, resistless phalanx against a social evil, alarming, degrading, or demoralizing, which steadily has become almost too common to provoke surprise—the transformation of marriage from a sacrament of God into a thoughtless and headlong business or social arrangement to be dissolved almost at pleasure. Six hundred and fifty-four thousand persons divorced in this country in the last twenty years! Such is the deplorable record on which Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy are already appealing for a union of all moral agencies to resist this downward rush of the multitude.