IN OUR CORRESPONDENCE columns the Rev. N.. S. Power takes
me to task for attempting to deal with the problem of remarriage after divorce in one paragraph. But all I was in fact trying to do was to show that the oft-repeated statement of another clergyman that 'the marriage of divorced persons, at the parochial incumbent's discretion, has been the Church's law and practice since the Reformation' was untrue. Nothing in Mr. Power's letter indicates that I was wrong. Although I am inclined to doubt his contention that a 'dis- cretionary power' to remarry divorced people existed in the early Church, it is of course true that the practice and teaching of the Church have not always been uniform. Sonic Welshman in the dark ages, for instance, promulgated a canon under which you could keep your wife for seven years and then, if you did not like her, you could swap her for a couple of cows. But this rather relaxed view of marriage was not common, and whatever may have happened before that date it remains true that the canons of 1603 for- bade divorce in the modern sense. The only way you could get a divorce before 1857 was by pri- vate Acts of Parliament, and these formed an insignificant exception to the general rule; they occurred on average about once a year. Whatever.
merits the views of Mr. Power and his friends in general possess, they arc not enhanced by bad history.
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