ncern. So, in short, being once
called upon for a practical purpose to consider divorce and the many
connected questions of re-marriage, he was inevitably roused to a
fervour on one side, not any less heated and intense than the fervour of
the mighty Milton on the other side two centuries before. He began
operations by an elaborate article in the _Quarterly Review_.[364] Here
he flings himself upon the well-worn texts in the Bible familiar to the
readers of _Tetrachordon_,--if, indeed, _Tetrachordon_ have any
readers,--with a dialectical acuteness and force that only make one
wonder the more how a mind so powerful as Mr. Gladstone's could dream
that, at that age of the world, men would suffer one of the most
far-reaching of all our social problems, whatever be the right or wrong
social solution, to be in the slightest degree affected by a Greek word
or two of utterly disputable and unfixed significance.

INTEREST IN LAW OF DIVORCE

I may note in passing that in another department of supposed Levitical
prohibition--the case of the wife's sister--he had in 1849 strongly
argued against relaxation, mainly on the ground that it would involve an
alteration of the law and doctrines of the church of England, and
therefore of the law of Christianity.[365] Experience and time
revolutionised his point of view, and in 1869, in supporting a bill
legalising these marriages, he took the secular and utilitarian line,
and said that twelve or fourteen years earlier (about the time on which
we are now engaged) he formed the opinion that it was the mass of the
community to which we must look in dealing with such a question, and
that the fairest course would be to legalise the marriage contracts in
question, and legitimise their issue, leaving to each religious
community the question of attaching to such marriages a religious
character.[366]

The Divorce bill of 1857 was introduced in the Lords, and passed by them
without effective resistance. It was supported by the Archbishop of
Canterbury and nine other prelates. Authorities no less exalted than
Bishop Wilberforce were violently hostile, even at one stage carrying
amendments (ultimately rejected), not only for prohibiting the
inter-marriage of the guilty parties, but actually imposing a fine or
imprisonment on either of them. This, I fancy, is the high-water mark of
the ecclesiastical theory in the century.[367] Lord Mahon in a letter to
Mr. Gladstone at this date