issolubility of matrimony which could commend itself
rationally, while Luther and Milton and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
maintained the religious and sacred nature of sexual
union--though they were cautious about using the term sacrament
on account of its ecclesiastical implications--so far from
believing that its sanctity involved indissolubility, argued in
the reverse sense. This point of view may be defended even from a
strictly Protestant standpoint. "I take it," Mr. G.C. Maberly
says, "that the Prayer Book definition of a sacrament, 'the
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,' is
generally accepted. In marriage the legal and physical unions are
the outward and visible signs, while the inward and spiritual
grace is the God-given love that makes the union of heart and
soul: and it is precisely because I take this view of marriage
that I consider the legal and physical union should be dissolved
whenever the spiritual union of unselfish, divine love and
affection has ceased. It seems to me that the sacramental view of
marriage compels us to say that those who continue the legal or
physical union when the spiritual union has ceased, are--to quote
again from the Prayer Book words applied to those who take the
outward sign of another sacrament when the inward and spiritual
grace is not present--'eating and drinking their own damnation.'"

If from the point we have now reached we look back at the question of
divorce we see that, as the modern aspects of the marriage relationship
becomes more clearly realized by the community, that question will be
immensely simplified. Since marriage is not a mere contract but a fact of
conduct, and even a sacred fact, the free participation of both parties is
needed to maintain it. To introduce the idea of delinquency and punishment
into divorce, to foster mutual recrimination, to publish to the world the
secrets of the heart or the senses, is not only immoral, it is altogether
out of place. In the question as to when a marriage has ceased to be a
marriage the two parties concerned can alone be the supreme judges; the
State, if the State is called in, can but register the sentence they
pronounce, merely seeing to it that no injustice is involved in the
carrying out of that sentence.[364]

In discussing in the previous chapter the direction in which sexual
morality tends to develop with t