Note 332 — Chapter XI · HISTORY OF SEPARATION AND DIVORCE UNDER ENGLISH AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAW (continued 2)

Read, for instance, the complaint of Right Rev. G. F. Browne, bishop of Stepney, in his Marriage of Divorced Persons in Church: Two Sermons Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Feb. 16 and 23, 1896. The author seems to pine for the good old days before the act of 1857 when "things were different;" when, thanks to the singular merits of the old system, the "difficulty and cost of a special Act" of Parliament made separations a vinculo very few; when that evil statute had not yet caused a "horrible familiarity with the idea of divorce" (42). Compare Luckock, Hist. of Marriage, 197-209, who likewise laments the desecration of the church through the celebration of the marriage of divorced persons; while he also condemns the alleged "connivance on the part of the Church of England" in the violation of the doctrine of indissolubility through the "issue of licences to divorced persons to remarry from Diocesan Registrars, ostensibly with the sanction of our own Bishops." He gives extracts from the Report of the lower house of the York Convocation (1894), which denounces the two practices mentioned, as also the "admission of persons who have entered into such unions to Holy Communion." Technically such a license is a "dispensation" which the bishop may refuse. It is often refused, as in the "Instructions issued to Surrogates in the Diocese of Lichfield": Hammick's Marriage Law, 362, and n. a. On these questions see Geary, Marriage and Family Relations, 577-93, giving extracts from the proceedings of the Lambeth Conference, (1888), and the Convocation of Canterbury at various times, as also from the opinions of individual bishops and ministers.