shed out of the most central human institutions, and they are only
to-day beginning to lift their heads afresh.

If--to sum up--we consider the course which the regulation of marriage has
run during the Christian era, the only period which immediately concerns
us, it is not difficult to trace the main outlines. Marriage began as a
private arrangement, which the Church, without being able to control, was
willing to bless, as it also blessed many other secular affairs of men,
making no undue attempt to limit its natural flexibility to human needs.
Gradually and imperceptibly, however, without the medium of any law,
Christianity gained the complete control of marriage, cooerdinated it with
its already evolved conceptions of the evil of lust, of the virtue of
chastity, of the mortal sin of fornication, and, having through the
influence of these dominating conceptions limited the flexibility of
marriage in every possible direction, it placed it on a lofty but narrow
pedestal as the sacrament of matrimony. For reasons which by no means lay
in the nature of the sexual relationships, but which probably seemed
cogent to sacerdotal legislators who assimilated it to ordination,
matrimony was declared indissoluble. Nothing was so easy to enter as the
gate of matrimony, but, after the manner of a mouse-trap, it opened
inwards and not outwards; once in there was no way out alive. The Church's
regulation of marriage while, like the celibacy of the clergy, it was a
success from the point of view of ecclesiastical politics, and even at
first from the point of view of civilization, for it at least introduced
order into a chaotic society, was in the long run a failure from the point
of view of society and morals. On the one hand it drifted into absurd
subtleties and quibbles; on the other, not being based on either reason or
humanity, it had none of that vital adaptability to the needs of life,
which early Christianity, while holding aloft austere ideals, still
largely retained. On the side of tradition this code of marriage law
became awkward and impracticable; on the biological side it was hopelessly
false. The way was thus prepared for the Protestant reintroduction of the
conception of marriage as a contract, that conception being, however,
brought forward less on its merits than as a protest against the
difficulties and absurdities of the Catholic Canon law. The contractive
view, which still largely persists even to-day, speedily took o