12 SEPTEMBER 1952, Page 16

Snt,—It is a curious thing that all those people who

favour marriage after divorce quote Sir John Stoddard's opinion of the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (in which one of my predecessors Dr. ;lowland Taylor had a hand) referred to by Dr. Sykes, but they all omit the verdict of the late Sir Lewis Dibdin- in his work English Church Law and Divorce, p.78.

" There is not, so far as I know, either in the judicial records or in history, any trace of its ever having been acted on (i.e., Reformatio Legum). But further, It venture to think that the fair result of an examination of the material collected in these pages -is that the law of the Church of England as to the indissolubility of marriage, and the corresponding practice of the Church Courts, remained unchanged through the period under notice, that is, from before the Reformation until after the present Canons of 1603-4 came into operation."—Yours

faithfully, W. J. BROWN.' The Deanery, Hadleigh, Suffolk.