November 15, 1857
“It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.” —Matthew v. 31, 32.
The passage: The old teaching said that a man who puts away his wife should give her a certificate of divorce. But Jesus says that whoever puts away his wife, except for sexual unfaithfulness, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Last week I examined a statement, made on very high authority, that the Sermon on the Mount contains rhetorical passages not meant literally to regulate our lives. I disputed this. I argued that those supposed to err through excessive rigor in applying Christ’s words had actually erred through too loose an explanation, missing hints He gave us for understanding them—and that this laxity weakened the application of His words to daily duty; they would carry far more force if not softened by their interpreters. Having discussed the words that hold the principle of the whole discourse, “Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” I proposed to examine two special inferences drawn from Christ’s teaching that have been thought impracticable: first, what ecclesiastics have inferred about divorce; second, what Quakers have inferred about forgiveness. I begin with the former.
Everyone has noticed how often the phrase “It hath been said of old time” occurs in the first part of the Sermon on the Mount, and understanding it correctly matters greatly for interpretation. In our text, and a few others, the phrase is shortened—“of old time” is dropped. This is not a major difference, but since I want to be exact with language often called loose and vague, I won’t pass over it; I think the change may be significant. In Matthew 19, when the Pharisees ask whether a man may put away his wife for any cause, Jesus answers by asking whether they have not read that the Creator made them male and female, and said that for this reason a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh—so they are no longer two but one, and what God has joined man must not separate. The Pharisees then ask why Moses commanded a bill of divorcement. In Mark 10 the exchange runs somewhat differently: Jesus asks what Moses commanded; they answer that Moses permitted a bill of divorcement; Jesus replies that Moses wrote this because of their hardness of heart, but from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. Since Christ’s purpose was to show that marriage is far older than the Law, not created by it, there is good reason why the phrase “ancients” or “old time”—elsewhere applied to commandments or venerable maxims of Scripture—might be dropped here. It applied, strictly, just as much to the bill of divorcement as to the commandment against adultery. But because His special aim here was to press home that there were times older than either the permission or the commandment, the phrase may have been deliberately omitted so as not to weaken that impression.
I rest nothing on this difference by itself. If a better reading turned up using the same words as elsewhere in the discourse, I would be quite content, since the principle I think this variation suggests is fully established by the passages already quoted and by the whole tenor of Christ’s discourse. We imagine He is enacting a new law to replace an old one. No—He is bringing to light something older than all penal laws and tables of law, a primary part of human nature and Divine order, something beneath all positive decrees and enactments, even beneath God’s own commandments, without which they would have no meaning. What would a command against adultery be worth if marriage did not exist? How can a bond be broken that was never formed?
The whole morality of the Pharisees, as we saw last Sunday, rested on forgetting this basic principle. They treated penal laws not as preserving existing obligations but as the foundation of them, and so made the highest divine laws pointless, contradicting them in letter as well as spirit. They would not consider the reason given for the Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment—that God cared for menservants and maidservants, wanting them to rest because He rested—so the whole nature of the day was reversed: not a blessing but a curse, made against men rather than for them. On the same principle, they supposed the Fifth Commandment was the ground of honoring parents, rather than simply affirming a relation already existing in human life itself—so honor to parents could be set aside in order to honor the God who gave the commandment.
I dwelt on this last Sunday not only because it reveals the Pharisee’s mind so clearly, but because it equally reveals Christ’s—in what sense He spoke an old truth existing from the beginning, and revealed what had been hidden since the world’s foundation. The fatherly relation existed from Eve’s first-born; the brotherly relation from when the shepherd and the farmer grew up together. The earliest book of the Bible, having nothing to do with Sinai or tables of law, is chiefly about the relations within a single family—a family through which all families of the earth were to be blessed—grounded on the revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With one hand, Christ struck at the Pharisees’ attempt to derange their own history, putting first what God had put second, subjecting a living constitution to mere decrees. With the other, He struck at their denial of a fuller revelation of God—not as bound to men by a formal covenant, but united to them in an actual Son—which He was making known in His words and acts, and would fully reveal in His death and resurrection. By basing everything on outward law concerning only outward acts, the Pharisee destroyed the great human history of the Patriarchs, and stripped the prophetic books of their coherence, their moral and political worth, the grandeur of their poetry, their warnings and hopes—by robbing them of their central feature: that they connect human relations to the Divine, treating the nation’s idolatries and unfaithfulness as adulteries against the Lord who had married it to Himself. By basing everything instead on God’s own nature and eternal Sonship, Jesus restored the patriarchal record to its place in the Divine order, and proved the prophets were not idle figures and empty rhetoric but direct appeals to conscience, preparing the way for One who could speak plainly of the Father.
The Pharisees did not only misrepresent the Patriarchs and Prophets; they misrepresented the statute law they worshipped, confusing permissions with commands. Where the Legislator wisely refrained from claiming a dominion over conscience he could not exercise, they measured conscience’s demands by his decrees: the rule that a man divorcing his wife must give her a writing was, to them, as binding a rule of life as the command against adultery—“both were in the book; where was the difference?” But when men argue this way, the permissive rule will be obeyed and the restraining one forgotten. Josephus’s records, and the Evangelist’s hints, show this was in fact the state of things in Palestine. The story in John 8—wherever it belongs—does not exaggerate that condition, even granting that the woman’s accusers went out one by one, convicted of the very sin they charged her with.
Yet nothing in Christ’s teaching, here or elsewhere, condemns the Mosaic regulation on divorce: “For the hardness of your heart,” He says, “he suffered you to put away your wives.” Here the Lord over the house justifies rather than blames His servant Moses. In granting this permission, Moses confessed the necessary limits of mere enactments. With insight that must have come from a higher wisdom—so contrary to a legislator’s natural ambition—he saw what Law cannot do: that his office concerned transgression, presumed hardness of heart, and had no power to make men love their wives or honor the marriage vow. Keeping the commandment always in view, adapting his measures to the actual state of his people as signs of God’s purpose, he could prevent outrages on God’s ordinance and keep alive some sense of its sacredness. Overdoing might harm reverence for marriage as much as neglect; the heart may be hardened rather than softened by attempts to force and crush it. God made them male and female and said the two should be one flesh; Moses might weaken those heavenly words by earthly attempts to enforce them. In this I see Moses’s fidelity to his divine office, his true inspiration, and his example of the modesty and courage fitting for legislators of every age—modesty to know how much they can do within their sphere, courage to refuse to overstep it, whatever pressures urge them to do so.
But though Christ does not blame the legislator, He speaks, as always, to the conscience and spirit of the man: “whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery; and whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery.” Nothing could be plainer: “I am speaking to you, my disciples, common men—not to lawmakers or judges. I speak to you who live under Moses’s Law, and could take advantage of the license it allows.” Our translators are right in the first verb but unfortunate in rendering the participle differently. “Divorce,” in our sense, did not describe the ordinary Jewish husband’s act; he simply “put away” or “sent away” his wife, and the Law required only a document to authorize this—little more than registering what was, in effect, his own unilateral act, not a court’s decision. I note this so you see how the actual circumstances of the evil Christ was rebuking fit His purpose in these words. Then comes the debated exception, which some try to remove by appeal to Luke 16:15, where it does not appear. Comparing the two passages, ours is more elaborate, part of a fuller discourse, involving a more careful contrast between old and new. Luke’s words illustrate a different point—that not a jot or tittle of the Law would be abolished in the Kingdom of Heaven that many were entering. But both passages describe the man as putting away his wife; neither deals with outward law or its permissions, a subject not even hinted at here. Luke’s version, even more clearly than Matthew’s, refers to the existing Jewish practice and the Pharisees’ notions.
The next clause shows even more clearly the personal character of this command. The man is treated as guardian of his wife’s life and purity; he must not put her away, lest he cause her to commit adultery. This explains and supports the previous clause: if she has already sinned, it may be right—a stern duty, not a privilege—to treat the bond as broken, to seek separation for her sake as much as his own. Such a doctrine, as a clergyman who has written on this subject rightly observed, vindicates the sanctity of marriage far more than the opposing view does.
The final clause, “whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery,” follows directly from the former. If her being put away does not, in God’s sight, dissolve her first marriage—even if earthly law authorizes it—then she is not, in God’s sight, married to another, even if earthly law sanctions that marriage. Again Christ speaks directly to the conscience: a lax outward rule does not excuse it, nor would a strict rule necessarily show it the limits of its responsibility. A woman divorced in our sense is declared not merely put away by her husband but no longer his wife before God. The cases are not parallel, and this text, which does not condemn the Mosaic Law, cannot tell us what a future legislator should or should not permit to men’s hardness of heart. But whatever the law says, the man stands before Christ’s tribunal and must ask Him to search his heart and show him what to do. To suppose Christ set aside the Mosaic code here and substituted a new one for Christendom empties His words of their life and power.
These few words have exercised immense power over mankind precisely because they do not correct outward policy but belong to the inward regeneration that the Son of Man came to bring. As long as a man is calculating what chance he has of escaping the marriage bond he has entered, he cannot regard it with real reverence; it becomes not truly a relation but merely a contract secured by penalties. Whatever more elevated idea of wedlock has existed in Christendom—in England—beyond this (and without it there would have been no Christendom, no England, only the semblance of social life) exists because Christ took marriage out of the narrow sphere of ordinary legislation, restored its ancient sanctity, and gave it a deeper sanctity still by revealing His own relation to humanity, which marriage sustains and expresses. The Gospel of marriage has done what marriage laws never have done and never can do.
So Christ has given the modern legislator help in achieving his own true ends that the ancient legislator lacked. Moses was obliged by duty and conscience not only to tolerate divorce but also polygamy; he would have overstepped his place as a servant in God’s house had he tried to stop it, however great the temptation. He would have been anticipating a stage of the world’s education that laws, as experience clearly shows, never accomplish—only the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the one Head of the race, accomplishes it, gradually if not at once, wherever it is preached and accepted. That is simply the fact, however we explain it. Laws and punishments have never been able to undermine what we feel to be so fatal to domestic peace and national strength; it cannot long coexist with this proclamation. Only then can the legislator move in the wake of a moral power that has gone before him, and say, “This shall not be; it violates a primary institution of society, which I will avenge”—and only then will he be heeded. The contrast is equally clear regarding divorce: the modern legislator can strip the man of any license to put away his wife at pleasure; he can guarantee her rights, watch over her, require the solemnest proof of a broken contract before divorce is granted rather than mere dismissal. So great has been this change—produced entirely by an invisible moral force—that we scarcely know how to give the old word its proper meaning any more; we unconsciously mix in ideas of formality and legality that would have been foreign to an old Jew or Roman, formalists and legalists as they both were.
The history of Christendom in every period bears this out. Intelligent, impartial Protestant historians, unwilling to credit all the power the Popes wielded in the Middle Ages merely to the superstition or wickedness of those times—believing no such power could exist in God’s world without something in the conscience of mankind upholding it—have asked the records of the past what it was in this power that could raise itself above the decrees of states and the force of armies. Their answer: the so-called Fathers of the Church presented, however distorted, an image of a Fatherly government over men; they appealed to the sense of the dignity and awfulness of relationships in men’s minds; they upheld these as more ancient and divine, more connected to God’s dominion, than any state’s statutes. So when they intervened to check the pride and license of monarchs, especially over their marriages and the dissolving of them, something in the heart of Europe defended and sustained that assumption—recognizing it as a higher tribunal correcting crimes beyond the reach of ordinary judges, a voice declaring that deeds done in darkness would be brought into the light.
Here was the power of these rulers; where was their weakness? How did they convince men that this power must be lodged elsewhere, that they could wield it only to injure the very cause that had made it tolerable and venerable? They did not assert the ancient ordinance from the beginning, stamping each marriage with the Church’s sanction as witness of its sacredness before God; instead they tried to give it an artificial sanctity by their blessing, treating it as so earthly and impure in itself that holy men should not touch it even after that blessing. They pretended to make marriage a Sacrament while denying that God had already made it sacramental by His own act and institution. Marriage was made to belong to a scheme of ecclesiastical jurisprudence rather than to the Divine order—degraded from its true high honor so that it could be raised to a fictitious honor derived from human words instead. Consider whether the worst scandals of the Middle Ages—the tricks by which marriages were declared void, the deeper confusions attending clerical celibacy—did not spring from this confusion about the Church’s own duties and powers. Consider whether the Church’s attempt to build a rival system of jurisprudence to that of states and civil courts did not arise from a secret distrust of its own power, a secret unbelief that domestic relationships were truly holy before God, grounded in His own revelation of Himself. The very Pharisaic habit of mind Christ confronted in the Sermon on the Mount reproduced itself in His Church: nothing was venerable but edicts; the New Testament was treated as a canon law meant to govern conjugal ties the ecclesiastic himself knew nothing of and was trained to scorn.
Eventually the Teutonic mind of Europe—filled from the first with reverence for domestic life—declared this could not stand, that a lie lay beneath such contradictions. Reading the Old Testament’s clear pictures of domestic and national life, people became convinced God intended both for men, and that Apostles could not have meant to set Lawgivers and Prophets at naught. It was the ecclesiastics’ own fault if this popular insurrection took too much of an Old Testament direction—if, in some Reformed countries, imperfect Old Testament notions of marriage simply replaced the gross perversions of the New that had prevailed among Latin nations. We may rejoice, cautiously, if we escaped that danger, affirming marriage’s fitness for all classes without admitting license of divorce. But I see no evidence we owe this blessing to our double jurisdiction of ecclesiastical law and courts. These, I think, have taught our people that marriage’s sacredness is somehow fictitious, tied to technical procedure—a relic of the system that destroyed the Church’s universality, humanity, and divinity by placing an earthly father between the Father in Heaven and His children, substituting symbols for actual communion. Ecclesiastical Courts give a quasi-sacredness to what should be essentially sacred, the mere appearance of indissoluble union instead of the truth in “God hath joined them together.” Far from strengthening domestic or Christian life, such fictions, I believe, blind our people—even wise and holy men—to the true divinity of marriage, making them impatient with Christ’s own words unless those words yield the meaning they want.
I mentioned last Sunday signs of this impatience appearing in unexpected quarters. To maintain marriage’s absolute indissolubility, some have tried to explain away the exception in our text—resorting, I would say, to the strangest and most damaging experiments. The word πορνεία has been declared a technical term; passages in the Prophets calling idolatry “fornication” and “adultery” have been cited to show this religious sense fits Christ’s purpose better, with heresy suggested as the New Testament equivalent of idolatry—implying, though not stated outright, that heresy might justify dissolving a marriage. This shows how far a theory at stake can drive men, and how much the ecclesiastical theory of marriage can undermine both Scripture’s teaching about it and its actual stability. The Prophets’ language, as I have tried to show, is not technical at all but the natural, simple, human language in which God reveals His relation to us and establishes our relationships to each other. If that is technical, everything in the Bible is technical. And once we have turned Scripture into a storehouse of fictions, what has actually been gained? Marriage is no more indissoluble than before—only now, instead of dissolution resting on moral grounds, on the destruction of the relation’s essence by one party, any husband who suspects his wife of some dangerous opinion could demand a bill of divorcement. Under such a system, what domestic intercourse would remain possible, and what domestic suspicion, tyranny, and hypocrisy would not become possible?
I do not oppose such maxims by calling marriage a mere earthly institution or civil contract, but by Christ’s own words, which they try to explain away, and by linking marriage to His revelation of Himself. There is an ambiguity in the phrase “civil contract” worth clearing up. Some mean by it only that marriage is fully valid before man and God even without ecclesiastical benediction—an opinion I share entirely. The legislative measure of twenty years ago authorizing English marriages before a civil officer was, I think, wise and godly. It relieved men from the terrible temptation of using holy words they neither understood nor believed, if they married at all; those who did use the words were likely to value them more, not as necessary formalities but as witnesses to the ordinance’s sacredness and preparations for fulfilling their vows rightly. Greater clarity and reverence about marriage’s nature seems to have resulted—because it forced us to see that marriage’s worth does not derive from the authority of God’s servants, civil or ecclesiastical; either may repeat, but neither can do more than repeat, His own words: “these two are one flesh; let not man put them asunder.”
Our experience with that measure should make us cautious about assuming that the recent measure on divorce—which some say tends to put asunder what God has joined—will make our people regard divorce with less aversion. So long as divorce was the privilege of a class, the horror of it native to our national mind was weakened. A measure that removes this prestige, treating divorce not as a boon wealth can procure but as the solemn declaration that a crime has broken the bond; that lessens the chance of vile details being paraded in courts amid jests and in newspapers before the public; that moves judgment of these cases to tribunals deciding with simple gravity by ordinary English justice rather than the subtleties of canon law—such a measure, we may hope, serves English morality. To prevent statesmen from exercising serious judgment about what truly serves these interests, by claiming Scripture has peremptorily settled the question, is, I think, a real wrong: it makes the legislator less aware of his solemn responsibility to God, and misrepresents the character of Christ’s own teaching. That teaching draws a sharp distinction between what one can do who makes rules for hardened hearts and imposes penalties on transgression, and what the Lord of the heart Himself can do when it submits to His guidance. Confusing these two provinces destroys both; demanding of outward legislation what Christ demands of the man himself makes law a presumptuous despot and the man a helpless slave. From such confusions arise all the perplexities about the alliance of Church and State that trouble us. That alliance is either a dishonest compact between two uneasy enemies, doomed like all insincerity, or a relation implied in the nature of things, in God’s eternal order—one that cannot be annulled, though it can be disturbed by either party’s ambition, by the belief that self-interest and mutual fear hold them together rather than a shared purpose to serve God for mankind’s good. When the churchman’s chief concern is watching lest the statesman rob him of privileges or powers, and the statesman tolerates the churchman only as one performing indispensable jobs, safe only if he confesses himself a hireling and acts accordingly, the country is cheated of the blessing both should offer. The churchman who thinks the statesman can take away his power forgets what that power is and who entrusted it to him; the statesman who wants the churchman to be a hireling has not understood that only a free man’s services are worth anything—if the churchman’s task is teaching men righteousness and honesty, he cannot be prepared for it by being required to be dishonest. Through such mean jealousies and petty struggles for precedence, what might be noble proclamations of the Church’s powers, and what might be just legislation, are both debased. Good, wise teachers make us fear State encroachment more than our own pride and selfishness. Parliaments take petty revenge for clerical opposition—first forcing clergy to use services the law has made unnecessary, in cases where some feel they cannot use them without profanation and sin, then clogging the concession, once grudgingly granted, with terms bound to produce endless resentment should any clergyman forget the obligations of a Christian gentleman by intruding into a protesting brother’s church. These are signs of a temper that perhaps only God’s present judgments can cure. May those judgments be effectual! May we not need still more terrible calamities to teach us reverence for each other’s consciences, reverence for the Lord of conscience who has given each his work and would have none scorn another’s—may we be taught, by terror and by mercy alike, the sacredness of the bonds by which God has united us to each other, and of that deeper, more mysterious bond by which He has united us to Himself!