It was undoubtedly an event of very great importance not merely for the Church but for the whole history of European marriage even down to to-day.  The whole of our public method of celebrating marriage to-day is based on that of the Catholic Church as established in the twelfth century and formulated in the Canon law.  Even the publication of banns has its origin here, and the fact that in our modern civil marriage the public ceremony takes place in an office and not in a Church may disguise but cannot alter the fact that it is the direct and unquestionable descendant of the public ecclesiastical ceremony which embodied the slow and subtle triumph—­so slow and subtle that its history is difficult to trace—­of Christian priests over the private affairs of men and women.  Before they set themselves to this task marriage everywhere was the private business of the persons concerned; when they had completed their task,—­and it was not absolutely complete until the Council of Trent,—­a private marriage had become a sin and almost a crime.[326]

It may seem a matter for surprise that the Church which, as we know, had shown an ever greater tendency to reverence virginity and to cast contumely on the sexual relationship, should yet, parallel with that movement and with the growing influence of asceticism, have shown so great an anxiety to capture marriage and to confer on it a public, dignified, and religious character.  There was, however, no contradiction.  The factors that were constituting European marriage, taken as a whole, were indeed of very diverse characters and often involved unreconciled contradictions.  But so far as the central efforts of the ecclesiastical legislators were concerned, there was a definite and intelligible point of view.  The very depreciation of the sexual instinct involved the necessity, since the instinct could not be uprooted, of constituting for it a legitimate channel, so that ecclesiastical matrimony was, it has been said, “analogous to a license to sell intoxicating liquors."[327] Moreover, matrimony exhibited the power of the Church to confer on the license a dignity and distinction which would clearly separate it from the general stream of lust.  Sexual enjoyment is impure, the faithful cannot partake of it until it has been purified by the ministrations of the Church.  The solemnization of marriage was the necessary result of the sanctification of virginity.  It became necessary to sanctify marriage also, and hence was developed the indissoluble sacrament of matrimony.  The conception of marriage as a religious sacrament, a conception of far-reaching influence, is the great contribution of the Catholic Church to the history of marriage.