Domestic Woe Caused By Phrase in Bible

March 1914

NEWARK, N. J. — Before Vice Chancellor Emery John P. Hammer, who is seeking a divorce from Anna Hammer, gave as the basic cause of his marital troubles his wife's too literal interpretation of the biblical injunction, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife."

"We often had words on account of my mother," Hammer explained, and so I got in the way of going to see her without saying anything about it to my wife. She used to say that, according to the Bible, after a man married he had no business to see his father and mother or other relations, but should stay by his wife.

"When my stepfather died in December, 1910, I attended to the funeral arrangements, as my mother was too old to do it herself, being about 80, and when I got home my wife said to me, 'Did you have a good time?'

"Then I told her that while before I had been going to see my mother secretly, thereafter I would do so openly."

This declaration. Hammer testified, brought on a serious estrangement, and his wife finally, on March 24, 1911, left him, after a violent quarrel.