was the essence of marriage, and the
mutual consent of the couple alone sufficed to constitute marriage, even
without any religious benediction, or without any ceremony at all. The
formless and unblessed union was still a real and binding marriage if the
two parties had willed it so to be.[328]

Whatever hard things may be said about the Canon law, it must
never be forgotten that it carried through the Middle Ages until
the middle of the sixteenth century the great truth that the
essence of marriage lies not in rites and forms, but in the
mutual consent of the two persons who marry each other. When the
Catholic Church, in its growing rigidity, lost that conception,
it was taken up by the Protestants and Puritans in their first
stage of ardent vital activity, though it was more or less
dropped as they fell back into a state of subservience to forms.
It continued to be maintained by moralists and poets. Thus George
Chapman, the dramatist, who was both moralist and poet, in _The
Gentleman Usher_ (1606), represents the riteless marriage of his
hero and heroine, which the latter thus introduces:--

"May not we now
Our contract make and marry before Heaven?
Are not the laws of God and Nature more
Than formal laws of men? Are outward rites
More virtuous than the very substance is
Of holy nuptials solemnized within?
.... The eternal acts of our pure souls
Knit us with God, the soul of all the world,
He shall be priest to us; and with such rites
As we can here devise we will express
And strongly ratify our hearts' true vows,
Which no external violence shall dissolve."

And to-day, Ellen Key, the distinguished prophet of marriage
reform, declares at the end of her _Liebe und Ehe_ that the true
marriage law contains only the paragraph: "They who love each
other are husband and wife."

The establishment of marriage on this sound and naturalistic basis had the
further excellent result that it placed the man and the woman, who could
thus constitute marriage by their consent in entire disregard of the
wishes of their parents or families, on the same moral level. Here the
Church was following alike the later Romans and the early Christians like
Lactantius and Jerome who had declared that what was licit for a man was
licit for a woman. The Penitentials also a