"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage indissoluble?" "I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble, _anathema sit_. The Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do," he said. "You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said. "I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so afraid of women that he--he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming." "St. Augustine is the authority in this matter." "And no one other person ever said so many contradictory things about it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery; in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake." Stainton paused to relight his cigar. "But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage." "Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the other." Von Klausen shrugged. "Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation. Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it." The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only intellectual. "It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted; "it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a sacrament." "Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an act of the flesh?" "Yes."