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50
Lord Guthrie
Church that the new Confession should include desertion, in
addition to adultery, as sufficient ground for divorce.
Among
Scots writers on divorce the most learned was the
great Patristic scholar Dr. John Forbes of Corse, born 1593, died
1648, son of Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen. After a
course of study at Aberdeen, Heidelberg, Sedan, and other
Continental universities, he was Episcopally ordained, and acted
as Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen during the Episcopal period.
Deprived of his professorship through his refusal to sign the
National Covenant, and exiled to Holland, because he would not
sign the Solemn League and Covenant, his attachment to
Episcopacy was shown by the sacrifices he made in its defence.
His Latin writings gained Forbes a European reputation, and his
Irenicum amatoribus veritatis et pads in Ecclesia Scoticana was highly
commended by Archbishop Ussher. In his
Theologiae Moralis
libri decem^ in quibus precepta Decalogi exponuntur, et casus Conscientiae
explicantur, which is contained in his collected Latin
writings, published in two volumes at Amsterdam in 1703, he
defends divorce for
adultery and for desertion, on scriptural
grounds, and discusses the teaching of Christ and St. Paul, and
the views of the Fathers, and medieval divines and jurists, with
ample citation of authority in Greek and Latin (Book VII. chap,
xiii.). His whole argument is characterized by ability, learning,
and a rare absence of the odium theologicum.
The historian, Dr. Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (nephew
of Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston, the leader of the so-called
extreme party among the Presbyterians), was born at Edinburgh
in 1643. He was minister of Salton for four years, and Professor
of Divinity in Glasgow University for five years, in connection
with the Episcopal establishment. Burnet's views in favour of
divorce can scarcely fail to have been influenced by his Scotch
training, and by his favourable experience of the working
of the
Scots system. He says in his Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles :
* The law of nature or of nations seems very clear that adultery,
at least on the wife's part, should dissolve it. Our Saviour, when
he blamed the Jews for their frequent divorces, established this
rule that whosoever puts away his wife, except
it be for fornication,
and shall marry another, committeth adultery, which seems
to be a plain and full determination that, in the case of fornication,
he may put her away and marry another. This doctrine of the
indissolubleness of marriage, even for adultery, was never settled
in any Council before that of Trent. The canonists and school-