This state of things, however, came to an end with the Reformation. By sweeping away all the canonical restrictions on matrimony, not ordered by Scripture, the statute, 32 Henry VIII., c. 38, increased greatly the freedom of marriage; but at the same time destroyed the liberty of divorce enjoyed by our ancestors throughout successive centuries. Rendering matrimony easier of entrance, it closed all the many gates, which had hitherto afforded spouses the means of escape from conjugal wretchedness. The chiefs of the Protestant party in Edward the Sixth’s time had, however, no wish to perpetuate the condition of affairs, directly consequent on Henry the Eighth’s mere abrogation of the non-scriptural impediments to marriage. Condemning strongly the excessive liberty of separation, which the ecclesiastical tribunals had for generations afforded to society, they were no less unanimous in condemning the doctrine of the absolute indissolubility of wedlock. If it was wrong on the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. These were the views of the Anglican leaders; views that found precise and memorable expression in the famous code of ordinances (the _Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum_) prepared for the reformation of our ecclesiastical laws by Edward the Sixth’s thirty-two commissioners for that purpose, who, doing away with the minor divorce (_a mensâ et thoro_), decided that the divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_ should be the only kind of matrimonial severance known to English law, and that it should be granted, (1) in cases of extreme conjugal faithlessness; (2) in cases where a husband, not guilty of deserting his wife, had been for several years absent from her, under circumstances which justified her in concluding that he was dead; (3) and in cases of such violent hatred as rendered it in the highest degree improbable, that the husband and wife would survive their animosities and again love one another; it being expressly directed that this last provision should not be construed as affecting spouses whose quarrels, though frequent and distressing, were neither incessant nor in the highest degree vehement. Had Edward the Sixth lived only a little longer these ordinances would have become the law of the land;--law which, though suppressed on the accession of Mary Tudor, would have been revived on the rise of Elizabeth, and handed down to the present time.