Convocation is not happy in its mind about the Divorce
Act. The Lower House has complained that it irritates the consciences of the clergy, and the Bishop of Oxford, besides admitting that fact, deprecated strongly the publication of reports of the Divorce Court. He proposed that the House should express formally its sympathy with the aggrieved. The Bishop of St. David's, with his usual incisiveness, was " inclined to move an amendment that the House lamented that there were clergymen whose consciences were aggrieved," there being obviously in his mind such a thing as a thin-skinned conscience. The Bishop of London doubted whether a festering sore was not the better for fresh air, and would not have their "Lordships asked to express an opinion on the pub- lication of the reports, though doubtless they did great occasional harm." As a matter of fact clergymen are not compelled to marry persons divorced under the new Act, and as to secret trials, they would quadruple the amount of adultery. The great thing most profligate men and all profligate women fear is publicity. The mere chance of being divorced strikes them as rather pleasant than otherwise, and the bare intimation that they had so been would in many classes not exclude them from society. The Bishop of Oxford forgets that divorce is no longer the luxury of the Upper Ten Thousand.
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