other cause than adultery has no moral validity however complete may be its legal sanction. To put away a wife for a trivial cause was to "make her an adulteress," that is, to degrade her into that category and treat her accordingly . This extreme injustice, however, could not alter the fact. Wife she continued to be, though the bill of divorcement were in her hand, and whosoever married her, thus unrighteously divorced, was really as much guilty of adultery as if he had taken her from her husband's house.
Now I think, when Christ's words are thus held strictly to their connection with the historic situation in which they were uttered, the absence of the saving clause in St. Mark's version of His speech becomes comparatively unimportant. There was no question anywhere of a total prohibition of divorce. Both the rival schools accepted the validity of the Deuteronomic rule, and only differed about the range of its application. In the actual expressions ascribed to Christ by St. Mark there
