The sound elements in the Canon law conception of marriage were, however, from a very early period largely if not altogether neutralized by the verbal subtleties by which they were overlaid, and even by its own fundamental original defects.  Even in the thirteenth century it began to be possible to attach a superior force to marriage verbally formed per verba de praesenti than to one constituted by sexual union, while so many impediments to marriage were set up that it became difficult to know what marriages were valid, an important point since a marriage even innocently contracted within the prohibited degrees was only a putative marriage.  The most serious and the most profoundly unnatural feature of this ecclesiastical conception of marriage was the flagrant contradiction between the extreme facility with which the gate of marriage was flung open to the young couple, even if they were little more than children, and the extreme rigor with which it was locked and bolted when they were inside.  That is still the defect of the marriage system we have inherited from the Church, but in the hands of the Canonists it was emphasized both on the side of its facility for entrance and of its difficulty for exit.[330] Alike from the standpoint of reason and of humanity the gate that is easy of ingress must be easy of egress; or if the exit is necessarily difficult then extreme care must be taken in admission.  But neither of these necessary precautions was possible to the Canonists.  Matrimony was a sacrament and all must be welcome to a sacrament, the more so since otherwise they may be thrust into the mortal sin of fornication.  On the other side, since matrimony was a sacrament, when once truly formed, beyond the permissible power of verbal quibbles to invalidate, it could never be abrogated.  The very institution that, in the view of the Church, had been set up as a bulwark against license became itself an instrument for artificially creating license.  So that the net result of the Canon law in the long run was the production of a state of things which—­in the eyes of a large part of Christendom—­more than neutralized the soundness of its original conception.[331]

In England, where from the ninth century, marriage was generally accepted by the ecclesiastical and temporal powers as indissoluble, Canon law was, in the main, established as in the rest of Christendom.  There were, however, certain points in which Canon law was not accepted by the law of England.  By English law a ceremony before a priest was necessary to the validity of a marriage, though in Scotland the Canon law doctrine was accepted that simple consent of the parties, even exchanged secretly, sufficed to constitute marriage.  Again, the issue of a void marriage contracted in innocence, and the issue of persons who subsequently marry each other, are legitimate by Canon law, but not by the common law of England (Geary, Marriage and Family Relations, p. 3; Pollock and Maitland,