what he has done. And the fact of his writing, not for Jewish, but for Gentile converts, may have led him, if he was actually referring to the same declaration to the Pharisees as the one related by St. Matthew and St. Mark, to have purposely omitted the words μn èì Togveía, which St. Matthew gives, as words likely to be not understood, or misunderstood, by his readers; and, viewed in this light, the omission is conclusive evidence, that those words were never intended to make any exception to the rule. This observation will apply equally to St. Mark, who wrote also for Gentile converts, and for that very reason would be likely to omit from his narrative any thing which might be unintelligible to such persons; and hence we may not unfairly infer, that on this account he did not set out the particular answer given to the Pharisees, in which the words un iπì Togveía occurred; they were unnecessary to his purpose, as he related the rest of the conversation, and gave our Lord's subsequent declaration to the disciples, which was as absolutely exclusive of all divorce as that which St. Luke has recorded. Matthew, I need not remind any body, wrote primarily for Jewish converts.

St.

There is one thing more which deserves notice, which, as it occurs equally in all the three Evangelists, I have reserved for consideration here; as I intimated, when I alluded to it, in my observations on St. Matthew's Gospel. I refer to the omission of the article in the original Greek, where the mar

riage of the divorced woman is forbidden. In the chapters of St. Matthew, it is ös av άoλeλupévv γαμήσῃ, and ὁ ἀπολελυμένην γαμήσας ; in St. Mark, it is ἐὰν γυνὴ ἀπολύσῃ τὸν ἄνδρα αὐτῆς; and in St. Luke, πᾶς ὁ ἀπολελυμένην ἀπὸ ἀνδρὸς γαμῶν. The meaning, therefore, in each passage, is, as every Greek scholar must admit, not the woman put away, but "a woman put away;" that is, any woman put away; and therefore every woman, and whether put away for adultery, or for any other cause; and St. Luke's expression literally is, "a woman put away from a husband;" thus marking the meaning more strongly. Were this omission of the article confined to a single passage, I should not be disposed to attach much importance to it, nor do I now rest the question on a matter so minute; but when we find it in each passage of the three Evangelists, it certainly seems to deserve attention. And it is impossible to say that it does not add force to the argument; for if no man can marry a woman put away from a husband, or any woman put away from any husband, without being guilty of adultery, this must necessarily be, because she is still the wife of the husband who has put her away; in other words, because the marriage union is not dissolved, though she and her husband have been separated. And if the marriage subsists as to the wife, it subsists equally as to the husband; for if it is dissolved at all, it is dissolved equally for both; and if not dissolved for both, neither party can marry again.

Are we, then, I would ask—and the question cannot be too often repeated-are we to set aside all this combined evidence against the absolute and universal prohibition of divorce a vinculo matrimonii? Can it be, that upon the strength of two such parenthetical expressions, as παρεκτὸς λόγου ποςνείας and μὴ ἐπὶ πορνεία, occurring in one of the gospels, and that gospel written for Jews, who would probably at once see their application, as the persons to whom the words were originally addressed assuredly understood them, the plain, the necessary meaning of the two others is to be forced and contradicted? And are these two expressions, not only to have a meaning given to them which they by no means require, and then to be used to distort, or rather to contradict, that of two other gospels, but even to have their own meaning, whatever it be, tortured, so as to make them applicable, in the passages where they occur, to other parts of the sentence to which they most certainly do not belong? If liberties like these are to be taken with Scripture, I know · not what limits can be set to any license which "an evil and adulterous generation" may require. We shall have no right to find fault with Luther, for endeavouring to get rid of the Epistle of St. James, because he deemed it inconsistent with his doctrine of faith; or to laugh at the Sovereign, who, on being admonished that he ought to forgive one of his friends who had injured him, refused, on the ground, that although we are commanded to forgive our

enemies, we are no where told to forgive our friends. In fact, we may in this way make Scripture say any thing to serve our purpose; and it will be well if we do not find ourselves at last in the condition of those "unlearned and unstable" libertines, of whom St. Peter tells us, "who wrest the Scriptures to their own destruction" (2 St. Pet. iii. 16).

But does the argument end with the gospels Far from it; although I do not hesitate to say, that it might very safely be left there. We find, however, in the Epistles of St. Paul, certain passages which bear so strongly on this subject, and seem so clearly prohibitory of divorce, that it is, of course, very necessary to examine them.

The first of these passages is the commencement of the 7th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and it runs thus: "Know ye not, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law), how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth? For the woman, which hath an husband, is bound by the law to her husband, so long as he liveth: but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of the husband. So then, if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man" (verses 1-3).

Now, on this passage it is perhaps unnecessary to dwell, further than to remark, that as the whole

force of the illustration consists in the indissolubility of the marriage union, except by death, St. Paul must have held that no human authority could effect a divorce a vinculo. Had such a divorce been allowable for adultery, there is too much reason to fear, that the frequency of the crime would at least have suggested to the mind of the Apostle some qualification of what he said, and have led him to use language somewhat different. I am willing, however, to admit, that the passage, being merely an illustration of an argument, may be understood simply as a reference to the general law of marriage, without any intention, on the part of the writer, to notice a deviation from that law in any particular case. Still, the meaning evidently, so far as it extends, marks the death of the husband as the only event which can release the wife from her matrimonial engagement, and brands her with the character of an adulteress, if she enters into such an engagement with any other man in her husband's lifetime; and it is not undeserving of notice, that if the words of the original text, ¿àv yévnται ἀνδρὶ ἑτέρῳ, and γενομένην ἀνδρὶ ἑτέρῳ, are rightly translated "if she be married," and "though she be married, to another man," they seem to point to the case of a formal separation, of the renunciation by the husband of his marital rights, and not to that of a wanton desertion of the husband by the wife; for it is not very easy to understand, how, in any civilised society, and still less in any Christian