"I understand, quite. Whatever I myself might profess, I feel I should have no difficulty in practising. But here is a delicate woman in the power of a brute. There is an element of coercion which should not be lost sight of and it might worry such a woman out of the possession of her principles. However, whatever the case may be, she does not go to church. She says she never can. But some keen unhappiness lies underneath the reason--if I could explain it I should not be here."
"Has she left her husband?"
"No. He, after one of his periodical fits of abuse, and I suspect violence, left her, and not until he knew he had lost her did he make any effort to claim her again. But he had imperilled her health--it is this that is my chief anxiety--wrecked her happiness, and made himself intolerable by his conduct. She divorced him and is free forever from his brutality.
"So I have come to you. I am to make her my wife--after I had thought never to make any woman my wife--and for me it is a very great happiness. It is a happiness to my brother and my sister. Through it, the home and the family which we believed was fated to die with this generation--my brother is, unhappily, childless--may yet live. Can you understand all this?"
"I understand all."
"Help me in some way to reconcile her religious difficulties, to remove if possible, this source of her unhappiness. Is it asking too much?"
The archbishop clasped his hands. His eyes fixed slowly upon Kimberly. "You know, do you not, that the Catholic Church cannot countenance the remarriage of a wife while the husband lives."
"I know this. I have a profound respect for the principles that restrain the abuses of divorce. But I am a business man and I know that nothing is impossible of arrangement when it is right that it should be arranged. This, I cannot say too strongly, is the exceptional case and therefore I believe there is a way. If you were to come to me with a difficult problem within the province of my affairs as I come to you bringing one within yours, I should find a means to arrange it--if the case had merit."
"Unhappily, you bring before me a question in which neither the least nor the greatest of the church--neither bishop nor pope--has the slightest discretionary power. The indissolubility of marriage is not a matter of church discipline; it is a law of divine institution. Christ's own words bear no other meaning. 'What God hath joined together let not man put asunder.' He declared that in restoring the indissolubility of marriage he only reëstablished what was from the beginning, though Moses because of Jewish hardness of heart had tolerated a temporary departure. No consent that I could give, Mr. Kimberly, to a marriage such as you purpose, would in the least alter its status. I am helpless to relieve either of you in contracting it.
"It is true that the church in guarding sacredly the marriage bond is jealous that it shall be a marriage bond that she undertakes to guard. If there should have been an impediment in this first marriage--but I hardly dare think of it, for the chances are very slender. A prohibited degree of kindred would nullify a marriage. There is nothing of this, I take it. If consent had clearly been lacking--we cannot hope for that. If her husband never had been baptized----"