Among Protestant writers the more urgent question has been whether, consistently with the teaching of Christ and His apostles, divorce may be sought on other grounds than adultery ; and the laxer modern practice has usually been justified as an extended application of the principle embodied in the words ascribed to Jesus.
The prima facie sense of the relative p: es in the Gospels (Mt 582 19%) certainly is that Jesus permitted divorce on one ground only, though the precise bearing of His references to remarriage presents considerable difficulties. + Are we then to describe a system of law which has multiplied grounds of divorce as openly defiant of the mind of Christ? To this it is replied in the first place that the apostolic teaching sanctioned furtherextension. The reference is to what Roman Catholics call ‘the Pauline privilege’ (1 Co 715. 16), according to which if a Christian husband or wife is deserted by his or her consort— being an unbeliever, the former is declared to be no longer under bondage, i.e. free to marry again. In the second place, it is contended that in this case Jesus, as in so many other cases, states a principle under the form of a particular instance, and that other instances are to be allowed which can be shown to embody the same principle.{ And certainly it must be granted in general that the Christian morality does not consist of a cast-iron system of laws, but rather of germinal principles which entail the labour and responsibility of thinking out their inmost significance and judging as to their proper application. In the evangelical precept the spirit counts for more than the letter. If, therefore, we assume that Jesus allowed divorce at all, which is the most doubtful point in the argument, it is quite legitimate to extend the exception to cases involving a
* The weakness of the exegetical argument is obviously felt by arecent Rom. Cath. writer, who, after admitting the reality of the ditficulty, and pleading that the passage be interpreted in the light of the clearer Scriptures, remarks that the matter affords a good instance of the impossibility of arriving at any assured interpretation of seu except in the ane of the traditional teaching of the Catholic Ohurch (Hunter, Dogm. Theology,§ 815
t As regards remarriage, the main exegetical difficulty to know whether the phrase, ‘whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery’ (Mt oe rohibits the re- marriage of every divorced woman, or on αὖ of a woman who has been unlawfully divorced. The latter view, supported by Weiss-Meyer and Alford (who translates ‘her when put away’), is the natural one, though it has the curious consequence that an innocent wife is, but a guilty wife is not, prohibited from forming a second marri The husband of a guilty wife, as is clearly implied in Mt 199, may marry again ; and by parity of reasoning, in a case which could not lawfully occur in the Jewish Church, a woman who has divorced her husband on the ground of his immorality should be free to take another husband. On the other hand, it does not follow that a legal dissolution of marriage ae remarriage. The legal decision gives rise, for the Christian conscience, to the further question whether the marriage has been broken in the sense intended by Christ.
{ This argument is suggestively stated by Newman Smyth (Christian Ethic, p. 410 ff.): ‘There is no other legitimate principle for divorce than that presented by the nature of the sin of adultery. If, however, we can say with a good conscience that some other sin (some sin which possibly in Christ's day had not reached its full measure of iniquity—a sin, for instance, like drunkenness, which may utterly destroy the spiritual unity of a home and threaten even the physical security of one of the per- sons bound by the vows of marriage) is the moral equivalent of the cause which our Lord had immediately before Him for pro- nouncing divorce, we shall be justified in admitting it to be likewise a proper Christian ground for divorce?’ Martensen argurs to a similar purpose (Christian Ethics, Social, Ὁ. 41.)
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real moral subversion of marriage under the proviso that the veritication of such be taken out of private hands and vested in a public tribunal. Nor can it be said that, at least in Great Britain, the occasions of legal dissolution allowed by law amount to less than a moral subversion.
While Christianity broke down the husband’s right of divorce along one line, on another the Talmudic law was developed with the purpose of impeding its exercise.
The most important provisions making in this direction may be thus distinguished; (1) Inculcation of the doctrine that the right was not absolute by the statement of grounds justifyin it—viz. suspicion of adultery, violation of decency and of Jewis customs, obstruction of religious service, refusal of conjugal rights; (2) enforcement of penalty in the restoration of the ‘dowry’; (8) complication of procedure in carrying out the divorce ; (4) deprivation of the right in cases where the husband had come under some incapacity, ¢.g. as insane, or as a deaf- mute, or where the wife—as insane, or a captive, or a minor— was ally entitled to protection (cf. Amram, Jewish Law of Div. c. 4, ‘Laws of the Mishna restricting the husband's right to divorce’). On the other hand, circumstances were specified in which the husband was compelled to divorce his wife, viz. cases of adultery, clandestine intercourse, leprosy, childlessness, ete. (Hamburger, art. ‘Scheiden’). The abolition of the man’s theoretical right to divorce was decreed in 11th cent. by Rabbi Gershom, who enacted that ‘as the man does not put away his wife except of his own free will, so shall the woman not be put away except by her own consent’ (Amram, op. cit. p. 52). The decree, however, was not universally accepted as law by the Jews, and is ignored by Maimonides (%.).