ttempted to set up this same
moral law for both sexes. The Canonists finally allowed a certain
supremacy to the husband, though, on the other hand, they sometimes seemed
to assign even the chief part in marriage to the wife, and the attempt was
made to derive the word _matrimonium_ from _matris munium_, thereby
declaring the maternal function to be the essential fact of marriage.[329]

The sound elements in the Canon law conception of marriage were, however,
from a very early period largely if not altogether neutralized by the
verbal subtleties by which they were overlaid, and even by its own
fundamental original defects. Even in the thirteenth century it began to
be possible to attach a superior force to marriage verbally formed _per
verba de praesenti_ than to one constituted by sexual union, while so many
impediments to marriage were set up that it became difficult to know what
marriages were valid, an important point since a marriage even innocently
contracted within the prohibited degrees was only a putative marriage. The
most serious and the most profoundly unnatural feature of this
ecclesiastical conception of marriage was the flagrant contradiction
between the extreme facility with which the gate of marriage was flung
open to the young couple, even if they were little more than children, and
the extreme rigor with which it was locked and bolted when they were
inside. That is still the defect of the marriage system we have inherited
from the Church, but in the hands of the Canonists it was emphasized both
on the side of its facility for entrance and of its difficulty for
exit.[330] Alike from the standpoint of reason and of humanity the gate
that is easy of ingress must be easy of egress; or if the exit is
necessarily difficult then extreme care must be taken in admission. But
neither of these necessary precautions was possible to the Canonists.
Matrimony was a sacrament and all must be welcome to a sacrament, the more
so since otherwise they may be thrust into the mortal sin of fornication.
On the other side, since matrimony was a sacrament, when once truly
formed, beyond the permissible power of verbal quibbles to invalidate, it
could never be abrogated. The very institution that, in the view of the
Church, had been set up as a bulwark against license became itself an
instrument for artificially creating license. So that the net result of
the Canon law in the long run was the production of a state of things
whic