It is important to remember that, while Christianity brought the idea of marriage as a sacrament into the main stream of the institutional history of Europe, that idea was merely developed, not invented, by the Church.  It is an ancient and even primitive idea.  The Jews believed that marriage is a magico-religious bond, having in it something mystical resembling a sacrament, and that idea, says Durkheim (L’Annee Sociologique, eighth year, 1905, p. 419), is perhaps very archaic, and hangs on to the generally magic character of sex relations.  “The mere act of union,” Crawley remarks (The Mystic Rose, p. 318) concerning savages, “is potentially a marriage ceremony of the sacramental kind....  One may even credit the earliest animistic men with some such vague conception before any ceremony became crystallized.”  The essence of a marriage ceremony, the same writer continues, “is the ‘joining together’ of a man and a woman; in the words of our English service, ’for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined unto his wife; and they two shall be one flesh.’  At the other side of the world, amongst the Orang Benuas, these words are pronounced by an elder, when a marriage is solemnized:  ’Listen all ye that are present; those that were distant are now brought together; those that were separated are now united.’  Marriage ceremonies in all stages of culture may be called religious with as much propriety as any ceremony whatever.  Those who were separated are now joined together, those who were mutually taboo now break the taboo.”  Thus marriage ceremonies prevent sin and neutralize danger.

The Catholic conception of marriage was, it is clear, in essentials precisely the primitive conception.  Christianity drew the sacramental idea from the archaic traditions in popular consciousness, and its own ecclesiastical contribution lay in slowly giving that idea a formal and rigid shape, and in declaring it indissoluble.  As among savages, it was in the act of consent that the essence of the sacrament lay; the intervention of the priest was not, in principle, necessary to give marriage its religiously binding character.  The essence of the sacrament was mutual acceptance of each other by the man and the woman, as husband and wife, and technically the priest who presided at the ceremony was simply a witness of the sacrament.  The essential fact being thus the mental act of consent, the sacrament of matrimony had the peculiar character of being without any outward and visible sign.  Perhaps it was this fact, instinctively felt as a weakness, which led to the immense emphasis on the indissolubility of the sacrament of matrimony, already established by St. Augustine.  The Canonists brought forward various arguments to account for that indissolubility, and a frequent argument has always been the Scriptural application of the term “one flesh” to married couples; but the favorite argument of the Canonists