ver much of
the Canon law doctrines of marriage, becoming in practice a kind of
reformed and secularized Canon law. It was somewhat more adapted to modern
needs, but it retained much of the rigidity of the Catholic marriage
without its sacramental character, and it never made any attempt to become
more than nominally contractive. It has been of the nature of an
incongruous compromise and has represented a transitional phase towards
free private marriage. We can recognize that phase in the tendency, well
marked in all civilized lands, to an ever increasing flexibility of
marriage. The idea, and even the fact, of marriage by consent and divorce
by failure of that consent, which we are now approaching, has never indeed
been quite extinct. In the Latin countries it has survived with the
tradition of Roman law; in the English-speaking countries it is bound up
with the spirit of Puritanism which insists that in the things that
concern the individual alone the individual himself shall be the supreme
judge. That doctrine as applied to marriage was in England magnificently
asserted by the genius of Milton, and in America it has been a leaven
which is still working in marriage legislation towards an inevitable goal
which is scarcely yet in sight. The marriage system of the future, as it
moves along its present course, will resemble the old Christian system in
that it will recognize the sacred and sacramental character of the sexual
relationship, and it will resemble the civil conception in that it will
insist that marriage, so far as it involves procreation, shall be publicly
registered by the State. But in opposition to the Church it will recognize
that marriage, in so far as it is purely a sexual relationship, is a
private matter the conditions of which must be left to the persons who
alone are concerned in it; and in opposition to the civil theory it will
recognize that marriage is in its essence a fact and not a contract,
though it may give rise to contracts, so long as such contracts do not
touch that essential fact. And in one respect it will go beyond either the
ecclesiastical conception or the civil conception. Man has in recent times
gained control of his own procreative powers, and that control involves a
shifting of the centre of gravity of marriage, in so far as marriage is an
affair of the State, from the vagina to the child which is the fruit of
the womb. Marriage as a state institution will centre, not around the
sex