really only worked in Victorian or Edwardian England, where a wife who committed adultery was literally turned out of the house in front of the servants. In other words, it only worked in a society in which public opinion virtually demanded that the commission of a matrimonial wrong should destroy the marriage, because it was “unforgivable” in conventional jargon. In more recent times before the law was changed, when the wife might be petitioning on the grounds of the husband's cruelty and desertion, and the husband might cross-petition on the ground of the wife's desertion, and both were asking for the Court's discretion in respect of their own adultery, the law of the matrimonial wrong began to look more like a game of snakes and ladders, than an instrument for arriving at Justice. In a modern society in which secular opinion measures the worth of a marriage relationship by how long it lasts, the breakdown of marriage theory seems the appropriate basis for the law. All praise therefore to the committee for having made their two main proposals; first, that divorce should be granted to a couple when their marriage relationship had completely broken down; second, that this should be the only ground upon which divorce could be granted, and should not be added as an additional ground to the existing law.
That is where my praise of the Report ends. Its subsidiary proposals were impractical, and betrayed an inadequate grasp of the subject. To justify this comment I am bound to criticise the Report in a little detail. This however is unavoidable if the real purpose of studying the Report is to be achieved, namely assessing the worth of the Church's real views on marriage and divorce.
Perhaps I can best demonstrate that the Report has only an inadequate grasp of the subject by giving the following illustration. In its enthusiasm to discredit the matrimonial wrong, it repeatedly refers to it as a “verbal formulation”, and therefore something “superficial and remote from matrimonial realities”. See particularly pages 29,42,43,58,60, and twice on page 65. It…