The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-03-27
RAPS SOCIAL LEADERS
REV. DR. PARKS HOLDS THEM RE- sPONsIBLE FOR DIVORCE EVILS.
Decries Higher EducatiOn-Pictures Misery of the Intellectual Woman With the COmmOnplace, Self
 Sacrificing Husband.

S8CTAufInk h08UAn0s 
 New York Special to Baltimore Sun. pr. Leighton Parks, rector of ultra fashionabble St. Bartholomew's Episco- pal Church. gave out an interview upon divorce today which will be read with some wincing by leaders of the -Four Hundred, many of whom are In his congregation.
 The leadership of society," pr. Parks predicts, will depart from those who are leading 1t into animalism.
 T do not hesitate to say that there are a score of women in this city who could put a check to this evil of divorce within a year.
 Let it once be distinctly understood that those much desired cards to balls, receptions, dinners and at homes did not go to men and women who had been divorced and scandalously mar ried again and 1t would be surprising how many people would find that they could live together. For responsibili- ty goes with privilege, and those who are recognized as leaders in society have got to give an account to God of their leadpership of society, as truly as the minister Is to account for his leadership of the congregation"
 Against Higher Education.
 In the higher education of women Dr. Parks also finds cause for some of the divorces now so common.
 Women" he said. have come to learn that they are the superiors of men. The girl who has been highly educated, who is trained in many tongues. who has read largely and thought about what she read. is mar ried to a man who, she finds after a short time. reads nothing but the news papers, and in proportion as his mind shrinks, his dogmatism expands, until 1t is almost impossible for a high strung intelligent woman to live with a man of that sort. And so she says to herself: I have got my own in- dividual life to consider. I do not in- tend to be asphyxiated in this atmos- phere of intellectual death. owe 1t to myself, I owe 1t to my child, to go free, that I may develop my own per- sonality.'
 'I am well aware that in saying these things I lay myself open to the charge of decrying the higher educa- tion of women. I do decry 1t. but only that I may plead for the highest edu- cation of women, in which the moral element shall be supreme.
 The Husband's Sacrifices.
 When the highest element is the intellectual, the woman thinks her hus- band is going to read Browning with her in the evening. If she would only use her imagination and ask herself what sort of a life this man that she despises is living. how. day by day, he does his dreary work and never com plains, how he is holding on to a posi- tion that is altogether uncongenial to him, but which he Is afraid to let go for fear she may suffer; how in all this time they have lived together he has never opened his lips about the dreari- ness, the misery of the deadly routine that he endures day after day for her sake, she might at least pity him.
 He never tells her that in his efforts to make her happy he has gone to work the wrong way and has spent more money than he can afford. When the bills come in he is shaken with fear, but he never asks her to retrench. He determines either to deny himself or to go into some speculation which will enable him to meet this unexpected call upon his resources. I tell you. if some of these highly educated women would simply use their imaginations a little to try to picture what a mans real life is, instead of asking him to read Browning. they would try to in tOt pi tI OpliIUtSHi, so that life would he made electric with new courage and joy and hope.
 'The joy of my personality Is not the amount that I know: it Is the amount that I can interpret. And the way to develop that personality. which in the final analysis is self-mastery, Is, as Jesus showed, by sacrifice"
 Dr. Parks advocates as remedies mental and moral training in stoicism and the banishing of divorce from the conversation of reputable people that their children may not grow up under the impression that it is the thing to be contemplated as the not improbable result of marriage. Upon the clergy in general he urges the necessity of re- fusing to marry man or a woman who has husband or wife living.
 Dissertation of The Service.
 ''It is a mockery." he says, ito read aloud that solemn service, Until death us do part when a divorced wife or husband may be in the church at the time smiling cynically as they remem- Der when the same words were spoken about them. Let us not pollute the church of God. If these people have a right to be married. and. mark me, do not say that they never have then let them go to the Justice of the Peace
 '1 think that if the clergy went fur ther and made 1t distinctly understood that they would not be party to a mar riage in which, in their Judgment, the union was an unfit one. they would save themselves from the scorn of the caricaturist and from the distrust of religious men and women.
 "A man comes here to be married at those steps. I know-everybody knows that he has rolled in the gutters of this city for the last ten years, and that girl who stands there to be mar ried knows nothing about his life, nor of the life of any other man. Do you suppose that I would stand up there and say Those whom God hath join ed together
 The marriage service is only to an- nounce the accomplished fact that God has joined those people together. Do you suppose He has joined that man to that girl. when the whole end and ob- ject of the marriage. as everybody knows. is that the girl may get some social position that she has lonGed for or that the man may replete his empty coffers-and where the money went 1t would be best not to ask?
 No, let the clergy say: No fee is large enough, no social eclat is great enough to induce us to be a party to this desecration of marriage i"