[113] Ezra x. 15. This opposition was borne down; the courts sat; the divorces were granted; wives were torn from their husbands and sent back to their indignant parents; and children were orphaned. Priests, Levites, and other temple officers did not escape the domestic reformation; the common people were not beneath its searching scrutiny; everywhere the pruning knife lopped off the alien branches from the vine of Israel. After giving a list of families involved, the chronicler concludes with the bare remark that men put away wives _with children_ as well as those who had no children.[114] It is baldly stated. What did it mean? The agony of separation, the lifelong division of the family, the wife worse than widowed, the children driven from the shelter of the home, the husband sitting desolate in his silent house--over all this the chronicler draws a veil; but our imaginations can picture such scenes as might furnish materials for the most pathetic tragedies. [114] Ezra x. 44. In order to mitigate the misery of this social revolution, attention has been called to the freedom of divorce which was allowed among the Jews and to the inferior status assigned to women in the East. The wife, it is said, was always prepared to receive a bill of divorce whenever her husband found occasion to dismiss her: she would have a right to claim back her dowry; and she would return to her father's house without the slightest slur upon her character. All this may be true enough; and yet human nature is the same all the world over, and where there is the strong mutual affection of true wedded love, whether in the England of our Christian era or in the Palestine of the olden times, to sever the tie of union must mean the agony of torn hearts, the despair of blighted lives. And was this necessary? Even if it was not according to the ordinance of their religion for Jews to contract marriages with foreigners, having contracted such marriages and having seen children grow up about them, was it not a worse evil for them to break the bonds by violence and scatter the families? Is not the marriage law itself holy? Nay, has it not a prior right over against Levitical institutions or prophetic ordinances, seeing that it may be traced back to the sweet sanctities of Eden? What if the stern reformer had fallen into a dreadful blunder? Might it not be that this new Hildebrand and his fanatical followers were even guilty of a huge crime in their quixotic attempt to purge the Church by wrecking the home?