Christian Marriage Indissoluble: A Plain Sermon / Preached at Archbishop Tenison's chapel, on the fifth Sunday after Trinity, 1857

Transcribed from the 1857 William Skeffington edition.
A Plain Sermon
PREACHED AT
ARCHBISHOP TENISON’S CHAPEL.
ON THE FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY, 1857.
JAMES GALLOWAY COWAN, MINISTER OF THE CHAPEL.
LONDON: WILLIAM SKEFFINGTON, 163, PICCADILLY.
1857.
Price 4 d. , or 2 s. 6 d. per doz.
The following Sermon is printed, partly because some who heard it wished to possess it, and partly because it has been suggested to me that it would be useful for distribution as a tract. It is simply what I have called it, “a plain Sermon,” written and printed for ordinary hearers and readers.
The Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him, and saying unto Him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And He answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
The words may well arouse us , my brethren—God’s priests and God’s people—from the apathy which would neither proclaim nor seek for the teaching of the Word of God, in the time of a great moral and religious crisis. You all know, probably, to what I allude. There is a bill now before the Lower House of Parliament, having passed the Upper House, which proposes to make it a common law of the land, that Christian marriages may, in certain cases, be wholly dissolved, and that the divorced persons may re-marry in the lifetimes of those from whom they have been divorced. Yea, and even more: the bill would give full liberty (designedly it would seem, from the language of its advocates) to the person whose guilt has rendered the divorce possible, to perpetuate that guilt in company with the first partner in it, and to dignify the union by the appellation of Holy Matrimony.