Handbook to the Controversy with Rome

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII MARRIAGE THE controversy between the Churches does not require a controversial view as to the significance of marriage on the side of nature, justice, historical development, and religion. It comes into prominence in its Catholic enforcement as a Sacrament, and as indissoluble, in the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII MARRIAGE THE controversy between the Churches does not require a controversial view as to the significance of marriage on the side of nature, justice, historical development, and religion. It comes into prominence in its Catholic enforcement as a Sacrament, and as indissoluble, in the treatment of hindrances to marriage and of mixed marriages. It is true that Catholic theologians cast up against the Reformers approval of polygamy on account of the decision which permitted the Landgrave of Hesse1, in the lifetime of his consort, who had become repugnant to him, to marry a young lady of noble birth. The Landgrave, who had the desire, not the courage, to sin, urged this concession, which was considered to remove to itself the responsibility of the sin, and boasted that he could easily obtain a dispensation of the kind from the Pope, just as Clement VII had offered it to Henry VIII. This, as the less evil of the two, was granted at Wittenberg in the shape of counsel connected with confession, after a serious exhortation to abstain from his sinful desire. It was a time when decisions, which for a thousand years had been held tobe binding as Divine laws, were regarded as erroneous and overturned. The contemporaneous wives of patriarchs and other friends of God in the Old Testament appeared not to confirm monogamy as a Divine law, although Paradise proclaims it as a Divine fact. An ecclesiastical sanction seemed to be given in the story of the two wives of Count Gleichen, the aged German housewife and the blooming flower from the East, the Sultan's daughter. Gregory IX, moved by her beauty, when on the occasion of her Baptism she threw back her veil, and by her love, for she went all lengths, was said to have granted a dispensation for her marriage. The historical l...