THE CHURCH AND DIVORCE.
[To TIla EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."3
Sia,—Would you allow me to try and clear the issue raised by the defeat of the Bishops on the Divorce Bill and to attempt to furnish an answer to the two questions now on everybody's lips: (1) What is the Church tradition on this subject? and (2) Why did the Lords bring in so doubtful a measure at all? (1) Our Lord definitely and distinctly tolerated, if Ile did not positively sanction, the principle of divorce carrying with it the privilege of re-marriage-of the innocent, if not of the guilty, party (Matt. v. 32, lax. 9). S. Paul extended those facilities, not for divorce, but for separation, without the privilege Of remarriage, in the ease -of unfortunate mixed marriages of Christians with heathens (1 -Cor. vii. 10-15). This view was admitted by the early Church, both Eastern and Western, until Augustine misled the Roman branch of the Western Church; but he •afterwards retracted his original opinion and regarded the whole. question tow"-obscure" and " intricate' (iatebrosissima) for him to come to any final decision for himself (Retr. I. 19, ii. 47; de fa. et op. 19).
The Roman Church, on the other hand, by holding marriage (in the teeth of the New Testament) to be "indissoluble," was driven, as Bishop Wordsworth has shown, to a practical " laxity " as formidable as its theoretical "strictness" (Minis- try of Grace, pp. 248, sq.). In the nineteenth century twoeele- brated:Roman :Catholics, .Hug and Dollinger, started to evade an awkward issue by inventing (in the teeth of all MS. evidence of the use of language end of early tradition) -the double fiction that-our Lord's words of dispensation were an editorial interpo- lation and that the sin He referred to meant one committed before marriage. And-these airy fictions are is3peatedby extreme High Churchmen to-day r Our impartial Archbishop (like the early High Churchmen, Bishops Hammond, Cosin and Jeremy Taylor) championed the New Testament view, which is that of Nature and Reason, and was admitted by later Romans, such as Cardinal Cajetan, Popes Zachary and Gregory III.
(2) The abuse of our Lord's language as to adultery auto- matically cancelling the marriage bond has always led to the temptation of committing this crime -as the only means of getting relief by divorce. To meet that difficulty the Lords came forward with a proposal which certainly goes beyond the New Testament sanctions by extending divorce to (a) three years' desertion, (b) proved insanity, and (c) incurable drunken- ness. To this the Archbishop—who took an honourably inde- pendent course—demurred as going too far. But what had the Bishops to offer in its place? Little beyond the strange conten- tion of two Catholic peers (the. Roman Lord Braye and the Anglican Lord Halifax) that marriage was " indissoluble " and a " sacrament." And history has shown what laxity that phrase involves in the mouth of a Catholic.
The whole question is one on which the early Church was hopelessly divided (Bingham, A., XVI. xi. 6; XXII. ii. 12), and is by no means a purely Church issue. The guarded language of the Archbishop on this delicate controversy will, I hope, be studied as it deserves to be by every impartial Englishman.—
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