into the scales, we have
that voice of infinite goodness and benignity, that 'Sabbath was
made for man and not man for Sabbath.' What thing ever was made
more for man alone, and less for God, than marriage?" (_op.
cit._, Bk. i, Ch. XI). "If man be lord of the Sabbath, can he be
less than lord of marriage?"

Milton, in this matter as in others, stood outside the currents of his
age. His conception of marriage made no more impression on contemporary
life than his _Paradise Lost_. Even his own Puritan party who had passed
the Act of 1653 had strangely failed to transfer divorce and nullity cases
to the temporal courts, which would at least have been a step on the right
road. The Puritan influence was transferred to America and constituted the
leaven which still works in producing the liberal though too minutely
detailed divorce laws of many States. The American secular marriage
procedure followed that set up by the English Commonwealth, and the dictum
of the great Quaker, George Fox, "We marry none, but are witnesses of
it,"[335] (which was really the sound kernel in the Canon law) is regarded
as the spirit of the marriage law of the conservative but liberal State of
Pennsylvania, where, as recently as 1885, a statute was passed expressly
authorizing a man and woman to solemnize their own marriage.[336]

In England itself the reforms in marriage law effected by the Puritans
were at the Restoration largely submerged. For two and a half centuries
longer the English spiritual courts administered what was substantially
the old Canon law. Divorce had, indeed, become more difficult than before
the Reformation, and the married woman's lot was in consequence harder.
From the sixteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth, English
marriage law was peculiarly harsh and rigid, much less liberal than that
of any other Protestant country. Divorce was unknown to the ordinary
English law, and a special act of Parliament, at enormous expense, was
necessary to procure it in individual cases.[337] There was even an
attitude of self-righteousness in the maintenance of this system. It was
regarded as moral. There was complete failure to realize that nothing is
more immoral than the existence of unreal sexual unions, not only from
the point of view of theoretical but also of practical morality, for no
community could tolerate a majority of such unions.[338] In 1857 an act
for reforming the system was at last passed