whole matter through what he believed to be the mind of Christ, and to act and legislate accordingly." At the Church Congress in Richmond, Virginia, in 1926 in a paper on _What Is Loyal Churchmanship?_ he boldly stated: Even when it comes to the canon in regard to remarriage of divorced persons, when I find in my conscience, standing before God in the presence of Christ, as I try to do, that a man and a woman have a right to be remarried, I will remarry them and take the consequences. I do not mean that I would go about seeking ways of disobeying the Church. I am putting extreme cases. Of course I do not mean that.... My first loyalty, my highest loyalty is to the Spirit and to the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ as God gives me grace to see it.... The human soul is more sacred than constitution or canons. Canons and forms of worship are used to illuminate and guide men's minds and souls to Christ, not to dominate them or compel them to conform to this or that.[18] In a few exceptional instances he remarried divorced persons. He held the present canon of the church to be utterly ridiculous in permitting reinstatement to communicant status following remarriage after divorce: "If one commits so grave a sin as to demand excommunication, how can one be reinstated while continuing to live in that sin? It is absurd on the face of it."[19] There were those who sneered at his position, saying it was individualistic and amounted to the setting up of oneself against the law of the church, yet he of all people was most conscious of the sin of pride and excessive individualism. At his last Convention in 1937, he reemphasized the point that the object of rewriting the marriage canon was not to liberalize divorce and remarriage: "We have been trying to interpret the mind of our Lord. We have presumed to separate men from the love of God by excommunication. This Commission is trying to set free to a higher plane this tremendous question which is facing us, to lift this tremendous relationship from regulation to the life of the spirit. We want this church to face reality." Nevertheless, the Commission marched from one defeat to another, but it still marches! There was passed in 1931 one constructive piece of legislation bearing on instruction in Christian marriage which was enacted largely through the extremely forceful defense of Frank Nelson.