England . . 160 Wales . . . 2 Ireland . . . 57 Scotland . 169 Appeals.
Judicial Committee . b House of Lords. 4 Divorce Acts.
1840 . . . 8 1841 . . . 5 1842 . . • 9 1843 . . . 5 In the Court of Arches the average ex pense of 32 suits was 1681.; in the Con sistorial and Episcopal Court of London the average expense of 87 suits was 1201. In appeals before the Judicial Committee the average expense of 6 suits was 586/. • in appeals before the Lords (4 cases, all from the Court of Session, Scotland) the expenses varied from 23/. to 531. The average expense (fees, House of Lords), of each act (27 acts) was 87/. 16s. 10d.
The causes admitted by various codes of law as grounds for the suspension or dissolution of marriage are various, and indicative of the state of society.
According to the law of Moses (24 Deut. i.), "When a man bath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, be cause he path found some uncleanness in her, then let him write her a bill pf di vorcement and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house." After 90 days, the wife might marry again. But after she had contracted a second mar riage, though she should be again di vorced, her former husband might not take her to be his wife. About the time of our Saviour, there was a great dispute between the schools of the great doctors Hillel and Shammai as to the meaning of this law. The former contended that a husband might not divorce his wife except for some gross misconduct, or for some serious bodily defect which was not known to him before marriage ; but the latter were of opinion that simple dislike, the smallest offence, or merely the husband's will, was a sufficient ground for divorce. This is the opinion which the Jews gene rally adopted, and particularly the Phari sees, which explains their conduct when they came to Jesus "tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause ?" (Matth. xix.) The answer was, " Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." From
this it is evident that Christ considered that the law of Moses allowed too great a latitude to the husband in his exercise of the power of divorce, and that this allow ance arose from "the hardness of their hearts ;" by which we may understand that they were so habituated to the prac tice, that any law which should have abolished such practices would have been ineffectual. All it could do was to intro duce such modifications, with the view of diminishing the existing practice, as the people would tolerate. The form of a Jewish bill of divorcement is given by Selden, Uxor Ebraica, lib. iii., ch. 24; and see Levi's Ceremonies of the Jews, p. 146.
It is probable that the usages in the matter of divorce now existing among the Arabs, are the same, or nearly so, as they were when Mohammed began his ler:dation. An Arab may divorce his wife on the slightest occasion : he has only to say to her " Thou art divorced," and she becomes so. So easy and so com mon is that practice, that Burckhardt assures us that he has seen Arabs not more than 45 years of age who were known to have had 50 wives, yet the Arabs have rarely more than one wife at a time.
By the Mohammedan law a man may divorce his wife orally and without any ceremony ; when this is done, he pays her a portion, generally one-third of her dowry. He may divorce her twice, and take her again without her consent; but if he divorce her a third time, or put her away by a triple divorce conveyed in the same sentence, he cannot receive her win until she has been married and divorced by another husband, who must have consummated his marriage with her.
By the Jewish law it appears that a wife could not divorce her husband ; but under the Mohammedan code, for cruelty and some other causes, she may divorce him ; and this is the only instance in which Mohammed appears to have been more considerate towards women than Moses.