BISHOPS AND DIVORCE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10133, 6 December 1910, Page 7

BISHOPS AND DIVORCE.

The Bishop of Liverpool, addressing the Diocesan Conference with regard to the attitude of the Church towards the marriage law, said there could be no doubt that in the immediate future there was a danger of the law of the Church coming into collission with the law of the State on the question of divorce, unless our statesmen were guided by the same spirit of fairness ,prudence, and righteousness which characterized their predecessors. The law of the Church was the law of Christ, that marriage was indissoluble, and upon that great law depended the sanctity of the home. At the Newcastle Diocesan Conference on the same day, the Bishop, in closing a conference on the same subject, asked his hearers to lay to heart what would bo the effect in England if it were decreed that a woman with a young family was to be tied up for life to an adulterous husband, or that a husband was to be similarly tied up to an adulterous wife. The case was so clear that they could hardly make themselves believe that our Lord did not speak as St. Matthew said He did speak. If a doubt was to bo cast on the veracity of the New Testament because, as some said, St. Matthew was an old man at the time he wrote his Gospel, they were coming to dangerous days.

At Wakefield diocesan Conference the Christian ideal of marriage was discussed, the Vicar of Wakefield and the Bishop of Hull being the principal speakers. They laid it down as essential that the Church should maintain the indissolubility of the marriage tie. The former also forecasted a possible conflict between Church and State on this point, even a possible severance of their relations. A resolution protesting against the grant of any further facilities for divorce by Parliament was carried: