" Another clergyman
pleaded: "An indissoluble marriage is a fiction. What is the use of
tying the Church up to a fiction? It is our business to teach and
not to legislate." Eventually the canon was defeated. But many of
the clergy were determined to follow it, anyway.
In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had been involved
in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey preacher pointed out
to him, was denied remarriage even by the civil law of New York. The
appeal to New Jersey was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to
give Charity up.
"You don't know what you ask," Jim cried. "I'll find somebody with
a heart!" And he stormed out.
CHAPTER XVI
Jim reported to Charity his two defeats and the language he had heard
and read. Charity's conscience was so clean that her reaction was one
of wrath. She pondered her future and Jim's. She could not see what
either of them had done so vile that they should be sentenced to
celibacy for life, or more probably to an eventual inevitable horror
of outward conformity and secret intrigue.
She knew too many people whose wedlock had been a lifelong tolerance
of infamy on the part of one or both. Some of the bitterest enemies
of divorce were persons who had found it quite unnecessary. She
felt that to forgive and to forget became so anti-social a habit
in matrimony that no divorce could be worse.
She was afraid of herself, too. She dared not trust herself with life
alone.
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