"Go to a Register . . ."

Twenty miles from London stands an historic hill and on it stands an historic Cathedral. Its dark cruciform shape lowers over the countryside, its Norman towers stretch sadly to the sky. It was in the 12th century that workmen first piled stone on stone to fashion the Cathedral of St. Albans. Since then many workmen and architects have rebuilt, altered and toyed, but the Cathedral still stands much as it was first planned by an abbot who wished to honor a martyred saint.

Within, all is quiet, all is holy. Here many a bishop in splendid robes has walked down the longest Gothic nave in the world.* Here altar boys, long since dead, have bobbed in genuflections as they hurriedly passed the altar to bring a priest a garment or a book. Here for 800 years God has been worshipped in high and solemn services.

From the Bishop of St. Albans, words majestic and inspiring might be expected. The present bishop is the Right Rev. Michael Bolton Furse, graduate of Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. He is 59 and long married. His fondness for golf and fishing proclaim him a philosophic gentleman. But an irruption from him last fortnight revealed the length to which a modern churchman, however anciently hallowed his setting, may let himself go when oppressed by the wickedness of the times. Bishop Furse was moved to speak out about divorce and about persons unbaptized. These matters had been rankling until the Bishop sounded shrill and frenzied. Said he: "I have given instructions to the clergy in this diocese that so far as

I am concerned they are not to marry people in church who have not been baptized. I have been criticized and called a narrow-minded ecclesiastic, and been told that I ought to be stopped. Well, stop me. I am going on until I am stopped.

"I am not going to be a party, if I can help it, to anyone being married by Church service who has been divorced. "I am not going to make the word of God a blasphemous farce [by condoning divorce]. No man has a right to ask a bishop to be a party to any such disgusting and gross act of blasphemy. If you don't like it, go to a register office and say 'I will take you until you make life absolutely impossible, and then I will be done with you.' That is the honest thing to do."

*292 feet.