Pretty Pass

The Christian churches, divided on many a point of doctrine, are united on many a point of morals: one of them is the evils of divorce. In England last week a concerted Christian attack was driven against easy divorce, loose morals resulting from wartime conditions.

In his sermon after being enthroned as Archbishop of Westminster, Monsignor Bernard Griffin, Primate of English Ro--man Catholics, told the international congregation in jampacked Westminster Cathedral that easy divorce, birth control, books and films that sneer at the sanctity of marriage, are all signposts along the road to ruin. Said he: "The decline of a nation has always begun with the disintegration of the family."*

Westminster's warning chimed with the joint statement recently given by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (TIME, Nov. 1, 1943). Last week still another prelate chimed in. In Chelmsford, Anglican Bishop Henry Albert Wilson found "the landslide in sexual morals" so immense that he feared Christianity "is hanging by a thread in this country to-day." What particularly upset Bishop Wilson was a proposed Government measure which would permit magistrates' courts to handle divorce cases, now reserved for higher courts.

Said the Bishop: "Unquestionably morals in a sexual sense are getting worse and worse. . . . But we have reached a pretty pass when judges recommend that undefended cases should be dealt with by magistrates' courts. The only preventive for divorce is to make it more difficult. Young and thoughtless people would not rush into marriage if they knew it was very difficult to untie the knot and . . . many tiffs would be composed if the partners knew a divorce was hard to get and a disgrace."

*Britain's birth rate on Sept. 30, 1943 was 16.2 per 1,000, highest in 17 years. But a vital-statistics authority, Sir Leonard Hill, said last week: "We cannot be satisfied until it has gone up to something over 19. ... There are too many old people and far too few young to make a vigorous nation."

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