hotel adultery case is the commonest, with the innuendo that the couple never actually committed adultery, but just hopped into bed to pose while the chambermaid brought tea, and saw them in this compromising position. I can only remember handling two cases of hotel adultery; whereas I must have handled a hundred cruelty cases. Furthermore in neither case was the chambermaid called; either the hotel manager wrote to say she could not remember, or else that the hotel staff changed so quickly she could not be traced. So adultery had to be proved in other ways. Things may be different in the more polished world round London; but in the West Riding adultery usually means that the spouse has gone off to live with another man (or woman).
Looking at the matrimonial wrong through rose tinted glasses as the writers of the Report seem to have done does not make the reality disappear; the reality is still there, and it is betrayal. Rose tinted glasses only lure the observer slowly and imperceptibly into a world where no evil is to be seen. So much for the Report's analysis of the conduct which leads up to the breakdown of marriage; what views does the Report express about the decree which pronounces that the marriage has broken down?
If the Church had a love of truth, and if it seriously believed that divorce (of marriage) was impossible, if it believed that when the judge pronounced a decree of divorce, all he did was to dissolve “the complex of legal rights and duties” but not the spiritual bond of marriage (see pages 11 and 49), one might have expected the Report to protest. A child could be excused for expecting the Church to shout from the roof tops, “But this is a farce, a fraud; people go to court, get a decree of divorce, and think they are divorced. But they are not! Nor are they free to remarry. Any so-called remarriage is only licensed concubinage. The Court has deceived them, and it ought not to”.
In fact the attitude of the Report is (page 9) “… in a society not as a…