LORD BROUGHAM.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE.

MR. URBAN,-If there be a man in England, it might not long since have been truly asserted, entitled to the compliment of all-accomplished, addressed by Pope to Bolingbroke, few, I believe, would have contested the just claim of Lord Brougham to its appropriation. His vast acquirements and splendid talents are universally recognised; and though not a little erratic or divergent in his political course, so as possibly to inspire more admiration than confidence, and to be fully as much an object of terror to his friends, like the elephant in battle, -a genus anceps, (so described by Livy, xxvii., 14,)—as to his adversaries, few, if any, public men of the present day more completely exemplify the portraiture of a great orator, which, in the delineation of Cicero, demands the possession of almost unlimited attainments," Oratorem plenum atque perfectum esse eum dicam qui de omnibus rebus possit varie copioseque dicere," are the words of the great Roman; (De Oratore, lib. i., cap. 13.) and to none can they be better applied than to our celebrated contemporary, as his Speeches, published, evidently,

though not avowedly, under his own supervision, amply demonstrate. But the more acknowledged his lordship's superiority is, the more imperative it becomes to watch and arrest the inadvertencies that, in the fervour of composition, may escape his ardent and versatile mind, lest the authority of his name should impart currency to error, and propagate delusion.

Four volumes have appeared of his Speeches, comprehending a great variety of subjects, and enriched with introductory elucidations, equally attractive in form and matter, of each topic. In the third volume, is one delivered in the House of Lords, Sept. 3, 1835, "on the Scotch Marriage and Divorce Bill," which is preceded by a Discourse on Marriage, Divorce, and Legitimacy, pregnant with powerful observations of the learned lord on the anomalous state of the English law, respecting the tenor and character of the marriage contract. It is quite peculiar, he affirms, and can be defended upon no principle, whether of justice or expediency; and this reproval of our special jurisprudence is apparently borne out by his subsequent reasoning. With the English law, its bearings or consequences, his lordship must, of course, "ex professo de jure statûs," be intimately acquainted; but his reference to that of the Church of Rome is, I respectfully assure him, inaccurate, as it is my present purpose to show. His words, at page 445, are

"In holding marriage indissoluble, the English law follows that of Catholic countries, where nothing but the sentence of the Pope-held to have the force of a release from heavencan set the parties free from the obligation of the marriage But those countries hardly ever present an instance

Vows.

of such Papal interposition; and very many individuals hold their vows in the face of God, at the altar, to be of a force so binding, that not even the power to loose as well as to bind, which resides in St. Peter's successor, can work a valid release from them. In England, however, where the contract is now held to be by law absolutely indissoluble, it appears to have been otherwise regulated in Catholic times; and it is somewhat singular, that, while the Romish religion subsisted among us, though certainly after the Papal power had been renounced, and courts were established for ecclesiastical purposes under the temporal supremacy of the crown, sentences for the entire dissolution of the contract, that is, divorces à vinculo matrimonii, were used to be given by these new tribunals."

It was necessary to extract this paragraph in full, because it contains more than one incorrect statement, as I shall have little difficulty, I expect, in evincing; while I disengage the subject from all sectarian controversy, and view it simply as a question of fact, resolvable on the ordinary rules of evidence, without consideration of the doctrine it involves, or the consequences that may ensue from its practice.

In representing the marriage vow as indissoluble in Catholic countries, his lordship was perfectly warranted; but that the Pope has the faculty ascribed to him, of setting the parties free from the obligation of their marriage vows, when once validly contracted, is utterly opposed to Catholic belief; and the denial of that power is not partial, as would be inferred from Lord Brougham's words, but universal. The possession of, or pretension to, it, by the Holy See, is contradicted by every author who has written on the subject, since the Council of Trent so clearly defined the bearings and construction of the sacrament, in the

twenty-fourth session of that assembly. It is not a point of discipline like the clerical or monastic vows, and as such flexible to circumstances, and within the resolutive jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, but a positive and indefeasible dogma of faith, absolute in principle and imperative in observance. So it has been contemplated and described by every writer of the church, Ultramontane or Gallican, from the memorable volume of Sanchez,* which the appointed censor read with so much gratification ("legi, ac perlegi, maximâ cum voluptate,") to Bailly's "Theologia Dogmatica et Moralis," (Lugd. 1810.) In the "Dictionnaire des Arrêts," &c. of P. J. Brillon, (Paris, 1726,) under the title Mariage, a long list is given of antecedent writers, ecclesiastical or jurisprudential, who have been followed by the voluminous compilations of Tournelly, and his continuator Collet, (in whose Course of Theology, tom. vi. and vii., Paris, 1777, the subject is specially discussed,) Habert, Richard, Billuart, &c., not omitting the curious little treatise of

*The title of the volume, composed of three tomes, is "Disputationes de Sancto Matrimonii Sacramento." Antwerpiæ, 1607, folio.-Some passages in this work produced a great outcry in the seventeenth century, when the Jansenists and Protestants equally assailed it as injurious to public morals. The Abbé de Saint-Cyran, in his enormous, and now unreadable mass of stale controversy, entitled, Petrus Aurelius, (1642,) and, far more, Pascal, (not directly, for he does not name it, but inferentially,) in his Provincial Letters, procured for it that notice which alone could make it dangerous, if susceptible of that effect, by rescuing it from the obscurity to which its professed sphere of action would have consigned it. In reference to the subtle researches too often engaged in by writers like Sanchez, Dens, and others, on Cases of Conscience, the eloquent Massillon, (Sermon de l'Evidence de la Loi,) observes- "Nos siècles ont vu encore croître et multiplier ces recueils énormes de cas et de résolutions.... ....ces amas pénibles de décisions...... que nous ne pouvons nous empêcher de regarder comme des remèdes qui sont devenus eux..... ...mêmes des plaies, et comme des tristes fruits de la dépravation des mœurs.

J. B. Thiers, "Des Superstitions qui regardent les Sacremens," (Paris, 1741;) nor Bergier's "Dictionnaire Théologique," originally forming part of the Encyclopédie Méthodique, but republished at Toulouse in 1817, 8 vols. 8vo. This last popular author, under the head Mariage, emphatically answers the question-" Dès que le mariage a été validement contracté, est-il absolument indissoluble dans tous les cas?-Jésus-Christ l'a ainsi décidé (Mat. c. xix., v. 6,) Que l'homme, dit-il, ne sépare point ce que Dieu a uni." These works are generally studied by Catholic divines, and not difficult, I imagine, of access in London.

The testimony of all is consentaneous and uniform; nor could it be otherwise, after the prescriptive and mandatory declarations of various Councils. In that of Florence, under Pope Eugenius IV. (a.d. 1439,) the object and advantages of matrimony are recited; and among the last is classed-" indivisibilitas matrimonii, propter hoc, quod significat indivisibilem conjunctionem Christi et ecclesiæ. Quamvis autem, ex causâ fornicationis, liceat thori seperationem facere, non tamen aliud matrimonium contrahere fas est, cum matrimonii vinculum legitimè contracti perpetuum sit." (Summa Conciliorum, p. 331, Ant. 1564.) The contingency contemplated in this latter sentence exactly applies to the late Duke of Norfolk, it may be transiently observed.

The Council of Trent (Ses. xxiv. die xi. Nov. 1563) is equally unequivocal in doctrine, and more minute in regulations, conveyed in a series of illustrative canons, the source of which is respectively traced to the Scriptures, in the interpretation of the Council: