These provisions would seem to be in the main wise enough, and yet out of one of them grew a considerable moral evil. Divorce had been recognized by the Salic law: "Seeing that discord troubles their union, and that charity reigns not in it, N. and M., husband and wife, have agreed to separate and to leave each other free either to retire to a monastery or to remarry," without question or opposition from either party. So ran one of the formulas; and as a sign of the divorce the keys of the house were taken from the wife, or a piece of linen was torn before her. The Church, however, opposed divorce, and declared it contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Yet, if one were wealthy or powerful, it was easy to have a marriage annulled, on one pretext or another. The most frequent was the plea for divorce for reasons of conscience, since the contracting parties, being within the prohibited degrees of relationship,--a fact which they had not known at the time of the marriage,--were guilty of incest in the eyes of the Church, and prayed to be relieved from the danger of perilling their immortal souls by deadly sin. Other pleas were resorted to, but this seems to have been a favorite one. By a subtile division of a hair "'twixt south and southwest side," this might be considered as not divorce, but the mere annulment of a contract which had been illegal and unsanctified from the start; and the distinction was an important one, since the rich noble or the monarch who had disposed of an objectionable wife in this way, and who had absolved himself by proper penances and by sufficient gifts to the Church, might, and generally did, remarry.