rules have been handed down by tradition from distant times. A refined state of civilization removes these restraints both from men and from women. Individual liberty is prized and maintained; and old customs and traditions are made light of and laid aside, if they cannot be defended by argument as well as by authority. Woe to that nation in which, as these restraints lose their power by the progress of refinement, there is nothing better to supply their place. The change was never more miserably illustrated than in the history of Roman society. The later Romans used to boast with sorrow and envy of their rude and martial ancestors, by whose moral feelings divorce was rejected, although allowed by law. What the Romans became in this matter when subjected to the influences of wealth and luxury, a Christian pen refuses to record. Every schoolboy knows to what cause the age of Augustus attributed the prevailing miseries: : Fœcunda culpæ sæcula nuptias Primum inquinavere, et genus, et domos. In patriam populumque fluxit. The barbarians of the North, when they broke in upon the empire at a later period, were still in this respect what the Romans had been in the more glorious times of Rome. The Romans themselves confessed the contrast, and said: "Inter pudicos barbaros impudici sumus. Plus adhuc dico. Offenduntur barbari ipsi impuritatibus nostris. Esse inter Gothos non licet Scortatorem Gothum. Soli inter eos præjudicio nationis ac nominis, permittuntur impuri esse Romani."* This was no result of any special or exceptional tendency of the Roman nation. We have no reason from history to believe that there ever existed any nation, not Christian, in which what are often called the natural virtues were originally more strongly rooted than they were among the Romans, or in which they have so long stood their ground against the corrupting influences of wealth and luxury. The universal judgment of the ancient world was, that every nation in its turn, when it had attained greatness and power, became cankered by indulgence and luxury, and then decayed and died away from within. It was of this that the Catos and the rest of the old school of conservatives in the Roman senate lived in continual fear. Against it they spent their lives in an ineffectual protest. They were for maintaining the social * Salvian, lib. vii. traditions and sumptuary laws of old Rome, because if pleasure and luxury once became fashionable, they knew no principle which it would be possible to oppose to them. No one thought them mistaken. No one contradicted them when they declared that virtue was beautiful, but for himself each man preferred pleasure. Were they wrong in believing that this canker was certain to eat into the vitals of every heathen state which once became easy and luxurious, and that no antidote known to them was potent enough to meet the evil? We believe not. Constituted as man is, we believe that every such society contains in itself the seeds of moral and social death, and that nothing will be found powerful enough to arrest their growth except the supernatural graces given through the gospel of Christ, and the precepts, faith, hopes, fears, and loves by which it sways the heart. Nay more, we think that these will never be so practically brought home to any refined and polished nation as to exercise their full influence upon it; unless, in open contradiction to the allurements of pleasure and luxury, it sees visibly before its eyes men and women choosing obedience, poverty, and celibacy as their highest happiness. Where such communities are in action before men's eyes, they cannot help seeing and feeling, what the later Romans admitted perhaps, but did not believe, that there are in this world other and better kinds of happiness than luxury and self-indulgence can promise. We believe, therefore, that the religious orders, so far from being, as many liberal Protestants imagine, useful only in times of lawless violence, and unsuited for an age of refinement and civilization, are (especially in such an age) the salt of the earth, without which society will certainly tend to speedy decay. Such, beyond a doubt, is the natural course of Protestant nations, their growth and their decay,-inevitable unless the process is interrupted by the presence of the Catholic Church among them. And if so, what must we fear or what may we hope for England, upon which Protestantism, alas! has taken so firm a hold? In answer to this question, it would imply a base ingratitude to the Giver of all Good if we failed thankfully to acknowledge that in England the natural, nay, the inevitable results of Protestantism have, by His mercy, been so much held back and delayed that, three centuries after the change of religion, we still see Protestantism only just passing out of that which we know by experience to be its first stage. Everywhere it begins by setting up the Levitical law as a complete Christian code, to the exclusion of the living authority which God has established; gradually it gives up its reverence for that code, and falls back upon the law of nature (or what it considers to be such), and upon the law of the land; at length it abandons very nearly every restraint. It is a singular thing that while all other Protestant nations have long ago reached this last stage, England has not yet completely abandoned the first. It is but yesterday that English Protestants, professedly and avowedly, abolished that Divine law which makes marriage indissoluble save by death. Even now they do not, as yet, admit divorces a vinculo, except in cases of adultery, and that (if the husband is the guilty party) in aggravated cases. As to the prohibition of marriage between persons "near of kin," the rule still remains as it was fixed immediately after the change of religion. We cannot be too thankful that such is the case, especially when we take it in connection with the "second Spring which is now calling forth the Catholic Church in England to a new life. For, although the grace of God can conquer any obstacles, yet the deeper the corruption of the national manners, the lower the standard of morals, the more difficult is the conquest, and the less reason we have to hope that a grace so extraordinary and inestimable will ever be granted. Would that we were able to accept the explanation offered by our Ritualist countrymen of this exceptional favour, by which England is so much distinguished from other Protestant countries, and to imagine it accounted for by the peculiarities by which the English Establishment is distinguished from other Protestant bodies. Nothing is more certain than that Protestantism has been running the same course here as elsewhere, although, thank God, circumstances have hitherto delayed in this respect its full development. With regard to marriage and divorce, the English Reformers were quite as favourable to licence as those on the Continent. In the reign of Edward VI. a commission was issued to Cranmer, Ridley, and eight others, to inquire and report, whether the Marquis of Northampton, who had divorced his wife, might marry another. That the existing laws, being those of the Catholic Church, did not allow it, was admitted; and in consequence the ecclesiastical court had given him only a divorce a mensâ et thoro. Collier says: "The case being new" [i.e., not having been settled by any Protestant authority in England, for it was 66 new in no other sense], "Cranmer resolved to examine it with the utmost care, and to go to the bottom of the question. To this purpose he drew a large collection out of the Fathers and other divines." The arguments at length are given by Collier, and Burnett reprints (from Stillingfleet's MS.) a series of Latin questions put to learned men, whose names are not given. All these Protestant authorities were of one mind-that marriage may be dissolved, that both parties ought to be allowed to marry again, and that a divorce a mensa et thoro is in no case lawful. The Marquis, in consequence of this opinion, obtained the first dissolution of marriage ever given by Act of Parliament. But this was not (like Luther's sanction of polygamy), on the part of the English Reformers, a mere act of cowardice, conceding, as a special privilege to a powerful man, what was not to be allowed to all the world. For the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, the code of Protestant ecclesiastical law which was to supersede in England the law of the Church, allowed divorce in case of adultery by either party, or of desertion and absence, a wife being permitted to marry "in two or three years" if her husband remained abroad, "either on the score of merchandise, or of serving in the field, and no tidings could be heard of him." Only in this case the second marriage was to be a sort of temporary engagement, because, if the first husband should return, and should "prove that he had been so long delayed either by accident or necessity," he had the right of "breaking the second marriage," and claiming back his wife. Besides these cases, divorces were to be allowed to either party in cases of cruelty and irreconcilable enmity.* It is plain that such a law would practically have allowed a divorce in every case, if it were desired by both parties; and it is strongly declared that every divorce was, in all possible cases, to imply the dissolution of marriage. Any degree of licence would have been covered by such ample terms. This new code of ecclesiastical laws was never actually enforced in the Church of England, merely owing to the accident of Edward VI.'s death, after it had been drawn up by the Reformers (who were authorized to do so by an Act of Parliament and by a Royal Commission), and just before it had been ratified. No document could more clearly represent the spirit of the English Reformation. By a happy accident the Divine law which makes marriage indissoluble, except by death, was never formally set aside in England until the Act of Parliament of 1858 established the unhappy system now administered by Her Majesty's Court of Probate and Divorce. * Hallam, Con. Hist., vol. i. chap. ii., says: "Divorce was allowed for something more than incompatibility of temper, namely, capitales inimicitiæ, meaning, as I conceive, attempts by one party on the other's life." Why he puts this meaning on the word he does not explain. Lingard supposes that in this case neither party might marry again. He does not give his grounds for this, and we cannot reconcile it with the positive language in which divorces a mensâ et thoro are forbidden in all possible cases. In the debates upon that Act the Catholic doctrine that marriage can be dissolved only by death was maintained, greatly to their honour, by the present Protestant bishops of Oxford and Salisbury; and, unless we are mistaken, by no other of their order. We very greatly doubt whether they are not the first Protestant divines of England who ever maintained it. If there are any names which the popular feeling of Anglicans has honoured with a quasi canonization, they are those of Thomas Wilson, Protestant bishop of Sodor and Man, and Lancelot Andrewes, of Winchester. Both have left practical proof of the strongest kind that they did not regard marriage as indissoluble. Wilson formally allowed a wife to marry while her husband was living. There was nothing to suggest the suspicion that that good man made, in that instance, any concession to undue influence contrary to his sense of right. With Andrewes it was otherwise. It gives us sincere pain to remember that he was not only one of the delegates by whose scandalous sentence the marriage of the profligate Countess of Essex was set aside, that she might marry the unworthy favourite of James I., but that his vote in favour of the divorce is specially recorded ;* while some of the other delegates ventured to object to it. We are not aware that any Anglican divine, from the Reformation to our own day, has ever maintained that marriage can in no case be dissolved. And, although until our own day, the law made it indissoluble, it is not to be forgotten that that truly Christian law was maintained on the statute-book only because the class which, until our own day, had exclusive control of the legislature, had devised and maintained, for its own benefit, an evasion by which it was exempted from the operation of the law-a private Act of Parliament (privilegium) passed, as a matter of course, in favour of any husband who had obtained in the ecclesiastical court a divorce a mensâ et thoro, and who could afford the expense. The change made in our own time is in theory immense; in practice it only amounts to this, that the other classes to which political power has now been extended have claimed a share in the licence which the gentry (who formerly monopolized it) had already secured for themselves. We have always felt that no practice so cynically shameless as that of our old Divorce Acts ever disgraced any Christian country, and the Anglican Church was from first to last most miserably mixed up with it. Its history is important, as illustrating the fact to which we specially desire to call attention, that in a country like ours above all others, to * State Trials. |