where the roots of this practice lay. They lay in this Report, which was the inspiration for the Act, that did the damage.
This report, Putting Asunder, represented the views of a committee appointed on behalf of the Church of England to put forward views on secular divorce. The committee sensibly pointed out that it is both impractical and unjust to attempt to make non-Christians conform to Christian rules, quite irrespective of whether in the opinion of right thinking people those rules are good rules, or bad ones. The Report therefore for practical purposes sets out the views of the Church of England on what the divorce law should look like in 20th. Century secular England. It is only incidentally that the Church's own views on the marriage bond and the possibility of dissolving it become explicit. If ever the Church had a golden opportunity to give wise advice to a secular world on how to run its affairs, this was it. The Church was being asked to advise on a subject, which she should have known all about. Let us see what use she made of her opportunity?
The background was that for some time two theories had been canvassed as to the proper basis for ending a marriage by a decree of divorce. One was the basis of the existing law; namely that there had to be proof of a matrimonial wrong. The chief matrimonial wrongs were cruelty, desertion, adultery. If a spouse proved one of these by the other partner, then prima facie he (or she) was entitled to a decree of divorce. In ordinary language the law of divorce was based on the concept of one spouse betraying his (or her) duty to the other. The other theory, which had been canvassed for a considerable time, was the breakdown of marriage theory, or the failure of the “two in one-ship” adventure, in which husband and wife had been engaged, see page 18 of the Report. The committee recognised very sensibly, as many people had done before, that the divorce law should be based on one theory or the other, and not on a hotchpot of both. What had to be faced was that divorce based on the matrimonial wrong…