Is Adultery Forgivable?

Should one infidelity disrupt a marriage? No, says the Archbishop of Canterbury, and last week British newspapers were making shocker headlines out of it.

The papers first picked up the Archbishop's answer in an Anglican pamphlet called The Church and Marriage. "It is the law which has made a single act of adultery a ground for divorce, not the church," he said. "The church would wholly approve if the law was no longer content to accept a single act of adultery as a sufficient ground." Other British prelates have gone on record in the same vein lately. Unfaithfulness, said the Archbishop of York, "should never be treated as the one unforgivable sin," and Bishop J.W.C. Wand of London said in a sermon: "It is a pernicious idea that if one partner has been unfaithful, then the home must be destroyed."

Methodist leaders chimed in agreement, but the British press seemed to think otherwise. The idea was "startling" to the Daily Mail, which editorialized on its front page: "As Dr. Wand reminds us, forgiveness is a Christian virtue. But so is chastity ... We are told, in the Seventh Commandment, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' It does not say, 'Thou shall not commit adultery more than once.' Or more than twice . . . Is a single act of infidelity to be applied only to one sudden fall from grace, or also to an infatuation that may go on for weeks and then end forever? ..."

The sensational Daily Mirror polled some of its 4,432,700 readers and found that three out of four husbands and three out of five wives thought a husband's single act of adultery was ground for divorce. When the adultery was committed by a wife, three-fourths of the husbands again voted thumbs down on the marriage, though only a little more than half the wives agreed.

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