Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/158

146 men: pious and wise men, whose task was performed with reverence, and should be held in reverence; but they themselves prefaced it with the declaration, that it had been compiled as far as possible to reconcile two contending parties in the Church. Two, if not three, of the compilers, were Roman Catholics. Much of the phraseology, and some of the services retained, are Roman Catholic. The phraseology of the marriage service belongs to that creed. The community of goods, referred to in that ceremony, does not exist with us: and the simplest reader must perceive a great contradiction between the Church form and the Protestant law: between the power vested in the Legislature to break marriages on a decree made by assembled peers; and the phraseology of a ceremonial, declared to be "symbolical of the mystery of Christ's union with the Church;"—which pronounce the parties man and wife "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,"—and dismisses them with the blessing, "What God hath joined; let not man put asunder." Is it the ceremony that makes marriage,—or the law that breaks marriage,—that is wrong? They do not agree; and solemn and true is the sentence which first meets our eyes in the preface to the Church Service: "There was never anything hy the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted." And that because the wit of man (such as it is), is perpetually swayed by the passions of man.

Now, divorce in England, we owe to Henry VIII. To that monarch,—profanely styled the Father of the Reformation, Defender of the Faith, Supreme Governor of the Church,—to that King, remarkable in youth for inordinate vanity, in manhood for inordinate sensuality, in declining life for inordinate tyranny, we owe the great chasm which divides the interpreted sense of such language, from the reality of its binding effect: —

"And Gospel light first shone from Boleyn's eyes,"