“Please go. I cannot tolerate any more.”
Jim left the old man in such agitation that a reporter named Hallard, who shadowed him, feeling in his journalistic bones that a big story would break about him soon, noted his condition and called on Doctor Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing degeneracy of public morals.
Hallard's paper carried a lovely exclusive story the next morning in noisy head-lines. The other newspapers enviously plagiarized it and set their news-sleuths on Jim's trail. The clergy of all denominations took up the matter as a theme of vital timeliness.
Jim and Charity were beautifully suited to the purposes of both sorts; the newspapers that pulpiteered the news and wrote highly moral editorials for sensation's sake; and the pulpiteers who shouted head-lines and yellow journalism from their rostrums, more for the purpose of self-advertisement than for any devotion to Christly principles of sympathy and gentle comprehension.
Jim was stupefied to find himself once more pilloried and portraited and ballyhooed in the newspapers. But he tightened his jaws and refused to be howled from his path by any coyote pursuit.
His next thought was of the New Jersey clergyman who had married him to Kedzie. He motored over to him.
Jim had told Dr. Mosely that clergymen ought to keep up with the news. He found, to his regret, that the New Jersey dominie did.
He remembered Jim well and heard him out, but shook his head. He explained why, patiently. He had been greatly impressed by the action of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church convened at St. Louis in October, 1916. A new canon had been proposed declaring that “no marriage shall be solemnized in this Church between parties, either of whom has a husband or wife still living, who has been divorced for any cause arising after marriage.”
This meant that the innocent party, as well as the guilty, should be denied another chance. The canon had been hotly debated—so hotly that one preacher referred to any wedding of divorced persons as “filth marriage,” and others were heard insisting that even Christ's acceptance of adultery as a cause for divorce was an interpolation in the text, and that the whole passage concerning the woman taken in adultery was absent from some ancient manuscripts. A halt was called to this dangerous line of argument, and one clergyman protested that “the question of the integrity of the Scriptures is more important than the question of marriage and divorce.” 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.