Page:Vindicationoflaw00hath.djvu/89

Rh mother's death would not remain another night in the widower's house, though he was left with children too young for him to take care of, and to whom she had become warmly attached, as they to her.

"I need not say that to my mind the matches referred to are very revolting. I never have officiated at one of them, and do not think I ever shall.

"But it is fair for me to add that others do not share the feelings I have thus expressed. Not only do laymen and laywomen thus married stand well in the communities wherein they live, but clergymen in good repute have formed such connexions, and bishops have officiated at them.

"Our Church in General Convention has never acted bindingly, i. e. by the joint action of the two Houses. But the House of Bishops in the year 1808 gave it as their opinion that the English Table of Prohibited Degrees is binding, and the two Houses appointed in 1838 a joint Committee to consider the subject, but the Report of that Committee was laid on the table in 1811, and attempts to take up the subject have been ineffectual, arising partly, I think, from apprehension of conflict with the civil authorities, but in great measure also from a feebleness of objection to, if not a positive approval of, marriages of the sort.

"Indeed, the public mind of our entire country seems to me to be alarmingly unsettled on this whole subject of marriage—the laws and usages in the different States being exceedingly diverse as to alike the formation and dissolution of the tie. In many of the States divorces and remarriages are shamelessly common, and for most trivial causes, and even pretences, and not a meeting takes place of Legislature, or Court, without numerous divorces being granted. Men meet in society sometimes with