om a former marriage has been granted for any cause by
a civil court may apply to his Bishop to marry another person." In other
words the Commission was endeavoring to have the matter decided not by
some hard and fast rule which was bound to do many injustices to
individuals, but by a more general principle to be interpreted by the
Bishop or Marital Court. The proposal was defeated, but in the battle
which ensued and has not ceased "Frank Nelson," says Bishop William
Scarlett of Missouri, "was a leading figure. He was trying to see this
whole matter through what he believed to be the mind of Christ, and to
act and legislate accordingly."

At the Church Congress in Richmond, Virginia, in 1926 in a paper on
_What Is Loyal Churchmanship?_ he boldly stated:

Even when it comes to the canon in regard to remarriage of
divorced persons, when I find in my conscience, standing before
God in the presence of Christ, as I try to do, that a man and a
woman have a right to be remarried, I will remarry them and take
the consequences. I do not mean that I would go about seeking
ways of disobeying the Church. I am putting extreme cases. Of
course I do not mean that.... My first loyalty, my highest
loyalty is to the Spirit and to the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ
as God gives me grace to see it.... The human soul is more sacred
than constitution or canons. Canons and forms of worship are used
to illuminate and guide men's minds and souls to Christ, not to
dominate them or compel them to conform to this or that.[18]

In a few exceptional instances he remarried divorced persons. He held
the present canon of the church to be utterly ridiculous in permitting
reinstatement to communicant status following remarriage after divorce:
"If one commits so grave a sin as to demand excommunication, how can one
be reinstated while continuing to live in that sin? It is absurd on the
face of it."[19]

There were those who sneered at his position, saying it was
individualistic and amounted to the setting up of oneself against the
law of the church, yet he of all people was most conscious of the sin of
pride and excessive individualism. At his last Convention in 1937, he
reemphasized the point that the object of rewriting the marriage canon
was not to liberalize divorce and remarriage: "We have been trying to
interpret the mind of our Lord. We have presumed to separate men from
the love of God by excommunication. This Commission