lf.'

III

DIVORCE BILL

This stern resolve to hold aloof did not last. Towards the end of the
session a subject was brought before parliament that stirred him to the
very depths of heart and conscience. It marked one more stage of the
history of English laws in that immense process of the secularisation of
the state, against which, in his book of 1888, Mr. Gladstone had drawn
up, with so much weight of reading and thought, a case so wholly
unavailing. The legal doctrine of marriage had been established against
the theological doctrine by Lord Hardwicke's famous act of 1753, for
that measure made the observance of certain requirements then set up by
law essential to a good marriage. A further fundamental change had begun
with the legislation of civil marriage in 1836. The conception of
marriage underlying such a change obviously removed it from sacrament,
or anything like a sacrament, to the bleak and frigid zone of civil
contract; it was antagonistic, therefore, to the whole ecclesiastical
theory of divorce.[363]

A royal commission issued a report in 1853, setting forth the case
against the existing system of dissolving marriage, and recommending
radical changes. In the following year the cabinet of which Mr.
Gladstone was a member framed and introduced a bill substantially
conforming to these recommendations. For one reason or another it did
not become law, nor did a bill of similar scope in 1856. In the interval
of leisure that followed, Mr. Gladstone was pressed, perhaps by Bishop
Wilberforce, thoroughly to consider the matter. With his prepossessions,
there could be little doubt that he would incline to that view of
marriage, and the terms and legal effects of loosening the marriage tie,
that the Council of Trent had succeeded in making the general marriage
law of catholic Europe. The subject was one peculiarly calculated to
interest and excite him. Religion and the church were involved. It
raised at our own hearths the eternal question of rendering to Caesar
what is Caesar's, and to the church what belongs to the church. It was
wrapped up with topics of history and of learning. It could not be
discussed without that admixture of legality and ethics which delights a
casuistic intellect. Above all, it went to the root both of that deepest
of human relations, and of that particular branch of morals, in which
Mr. Gladstone always felt the vividest co