Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/148

 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 persons bound by the vows of marriage) is the moral equivalent of the cause which our Lord had immediately before him for pronouncing divorce, shall we be justified in admitting it to be likewise a proper Christian ground of divorce?

"Such is the question fairly stated upon which Christian moralists have not been entirely agreed. Our answer to it will depend very much on two considerations. The first will be our general habit of reading the New Testament as another law, or of interpreting its precepts to the best of our understanding in what we may judge to have been the spirit in which they were spoken, remembering the Master's own saying that his words are spirit and they are life. The other consideration will be our confidence in the correctness of the premise that the special sin alleged, by which the marriage union has been violated, is the moral equivalent of adultery. In proportion as we are satisfied that it is in its consequence as destructive of the possibility of moral continuance in the married relation, we shall be inclined to think that it is included under the supreme principle which controlled the judgment of Jesus concerning certain habits, at which Moses winked, of the easy putting away of a wife. In other words, we shall argue that divorce for such other cause justifies itself to the Christian conscience, because we are satisfied that Jesus himself, if he were present and speaking to the men of our times, in the same intent and spirit in which he spoke of old, would pronounce this cause to be as heinous as adultery in its destruction of the sacredness