There is a huge difference in that in today's world this "bride" was not under any pressure to get married. Historically, European nobilty were, and they could easily find themselves obliged to marry someone deemed "suitable", while love in a romantic sense, was elsewhere.
The 1960's is when marriage and family stability really started to break down. I believe that two world wars and a terrifying economic depression were relevant to that happening, but they were happening concommitant to lower church attendance and the churches starting to "liberalise". My parents married in the early 1960's, they divorced in the late 1980's. At that time 1 in 4 marriages were ending in divorce. Now half of all marriages end in divorce. As far as I am concerned, this is disturbing, and it does need solving.
I believe that to be a sincere Christian in my own country right now, a person has to be quite strong in the faith, there is a lot of opposition people have to be able to withstand. I do not believe that the historic situation was always this way, I have seen the shift happen over the course of my lifetime. It might well be the case that previously the most convinced were in churches on Sundays with a lot of people not quite so strong in their faith also in the same church. In that situation, the stronger can influence and support the rest when the opportunity or need arises. There definitely were more people in the churches, and that alone makes a significant difference to Jesus' in terms of His ability to connect a person to stronger faith in Him.
Thank you for the excellent reply. Christianity in Great Britain (where I think you are living, if I am not mistaken) has a very complex history. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries as well as the Civil War, the Church of England attempted to reign supreme. All Dissent, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, was suppressed, with heavy penalties for Dissenters. One of my ancestors was a Dissenter who migrated, along with many others to New England in America in the seventeenth century. It seems to me that Christians who were strong in their personal faith in England and Ireland migrated, usually unwillingly, to escape harsh penalties. In the nineteenth century the Penal Laws were finally eliminated, but the damage was done. The eighteenth century had witnessed an immense disintegration of the Church and Society. Drunkenness and immorality were rife both in Society and among clergy of the Church. The Great Awakening, which began in North America found its way quickly abroad and the nineteenth century, known now as the Victorian Era, has gone down in history as one of deep piety and faith, although there were many serious exceptions to that image, not the least being Prince Albert Edward (subsequently King Edward VII) whose personal life was that of an extreme libertine. Hypocrisy eventually revealed its ugly face. When the first world war burst forth and the multitudes of working men were slaughtered in the trenches, the damage to the surviving social order was immense. The enormous output of war memorials did little to stanch the wave of resentment against the upper classes and their church. The Great Depression, fortunately, was not nearly as disastrous in the British Empire as in the United States, primarily because the British Colonies were relatively unaffected. Hitler's War, on the other hand, once more decimated the ranks of patriotic and faithful Britons. The 1950's was a decade of financial austerity caused by the war years. When prosperity resumed in the 1960's the populace, having been psychologically battered so brutally, found little reason to attend church. Mandatory church attendance, of course, had long been abolished, with the result that, as in other European countries, church attendance plummeted and, with it, any effective moral suasion.
That is my perspective and I am open to correction. At this point, I would probably compare the current situation in Great Britain with that of the eighteenth century. In the British Commonwealth, however, the situation is quite different. Christianity is thriving (relatively) as in Hong Kong, which, despite the brutal imposition of power from Beijing, still maintains the fruit of British missionaries and martyrs. A similar situation is also occurring in China itself, which, of course, never was an official colony, but which experienced mission work, primarily from England and also from other countries.
