RECTOR SUPPORTS DIVORCE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 15900, 24 April 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

RECTOR SUPPORTS DIVORCE

LAW DENOUNCED AS "NUT ENGLISH." A sensation in ChurchXcircles has been caused, by a Lenten sermon* of the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant, rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Ascension, one of the most fashionable churches in New York, advocating freer divorce. " If marriage is founded on the affection of two persons for each other, as a marriage* in America is supposed to be," he said, " with the disappearance of such sentiment disappears the only ground for marriage." ,

The present law of the Episcopal Church, which recognises only one cause for divorce and permits the clergy to remarry only the innocent party, is characterised by Mr. Grant as " not Protestant, not English, not modern," but Roman and medisßval and not representative- of the opinions of the majority of the communicants. The old marriage laws, he went on, considered women merely as the chattels of their husbands. The Tenth Commandment forbade & coveting one's neighbour's wife just as it forbade coveting his ox or ass. There was no idea of spiritual wrong to the neighbour in this proliibtion— of property wrong. After referring to the recommendations of the Royal Commission in favour of moro liberal divorce laws, the rector said: " Divorce is not so selfishly individualistic as it seems to the ultra-conservative. Tha family should be the place where the children can be trained to the highest conception of love and duty. There could be no greater obstacle to their proper development than distrust and discord between parents. Take a sane, fearless attitude on this question of divorce, and do not lei yourselves be put down by sneers or shrugs."

Mr. Grant's utterances have aroused i storm of denunciation. Dr. William Man- | ning, the rector of Trinity, the oldest and the richest church in New York, brands them as the advocacy of free love, while Bishop Greer, the head of the diocese, hag intimated that only the fact that Mr. Grant had spoken as an individual and not for the Church saved him from the danger of a trial for heresy. Mr. Grant of late years has attracted much attention by his practice of inviting laymen who are exponents of various radical views to address Sunday afternoon gatherings at) the Parish House—a practice which has brought him into serious disputes with the conservative element among his parishioners, who have forced him to modify his programme.