into a cloister or to contract another union (E. de la
Bedolliere, _Histoire des Moeurs des Francais_, vol. i, p. 317).
Such a practice, however it might accord with the germinal
principle of consent embodied in the Canon law, was far too
opposed to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the sacramental
indissolubility of matrimony to be permanently allowed, and it
was completely crushed out.

The fact that we so rarely find divorce by mutual consent in Christendom
until the beginning of the nineteenth century, that then it required a man
of stupendous and revolutionary genius like Napoleon to reintroduce it,
and that even he was unable to do so effectually, is clearly due to the
immense victory which the ascetic spirit of Christianity, as firmly
embodied in the Canon law, had gained over the souls and bodies of men. So
subjugated were European traditions and institutions by this spirit that
even the volcanic emotional uprising of the Reformation, as we have seen,
could not shake it off. When Protestant States naturally resumed the
control of secular affairs which had been absorbed by the Church, and
rescued from ecclesiastical hands those things which belonged to the
sphere of the individual conscience, it might have seemed that marriage
and divorce would have been among the first concerns to be thus
transferred. Yet, as we know, England was about as much enslaved to the
spirit and even the letter of Canon law in the nineteenth as in the
fourteenth century, and even to-day English law, though no longer
supported by the feeling of the masses, clings to the same traditions.

There seems to be little doubt, however, that the modern movement for
divorce must inevitably tend to reach the goal of separation by the will
of both parties, or, under proper conditions and restrictions, by the
will of one party. It now requires the will of two persons to form a
marriage; law insists on that condition.[352] It is logical as well as
just that law should take the next step involved by the historical
evolution of marriage, and equally insist that it requires the will of two
persons to maintain a marriage. This solution is, without doubt, the only
way of deliverance from the crudities, the indecencies, the inextricable
complexities which are introduced into law by the vain attempt to foresee
in detail all the possibilities of conjugal disharmony which may arise
under the conditions of modern civilization. It is, moreov