loc. cit.).  The Canonists regarded the disabilities attaching to bastardy as a punishment inflicted on the offending parents, and considered, therefore, that no burden should fall on the children when there had been a ceremony in good faith on the part of one at least of the parents.  In this respect the English law is less reasonable and humane.  It was at the Council of Merton, in 1236, that the barons of England rejected the proposal to make the laws of England harmonize with the Canon law, that is, with the ecclesiastical law of Christendom generally, in allowing children born before wedlock to be legitimated by subsequent marriage.  Grosseteste poured forth his eloquence and his arguments in favor of the change, but in vain, and the law of England has ever since stood alone in this respect (Freeman, “Merton Priory,” English Towns and Districts).  The proposal was rejected in the famous formula, “Nolumus leges Angliae mutare,” a formula which merely stood for an unreasonable and inhumane obstinacy.

In the United States, while by common law subsequent marriage fails to legitimate children born before marriage, in many of the States the subsequent marriage of the parents effects by statute the legitimacy of the child, sometimes (as in Maine) automatically, more usually (as in Massachusetts) through special acknowledgment by the father.

The appearance of Luther and the Reformation involved the decay of the Canon law system so far as Europe as a whole was concerned.  It was for many reasons impossible for the Protestant reformers to retain formally either the Catholic conception of matrimony or the precariously elaborate legal structure which the Church had built up on that conception.  It can scarcely be said, indeed, that the Protestant attitude towards the Catholic idea of matrimony was altogether a clear, logical, or consistent attitude.  It was a revolt, an emotional impulse, rather than a matter of reasoned principle.  In its inevitable necessity, under the circumstances of the rise of Protestantism, lies its justification, and, on the whole, its wholesome soundness.  It took the form, which may seem strange in a religious movement, of proclaiming that marriage is not a religious but a secular matter.  Marriage is, said Luther, “a worldly thing,” and Calvin put it on the same level as house-building, farming, or shoe-making.  But while this secularization of marriage represents the general and final drift of Protestantism, the leaders of Protestantism were themselves not altogether confident and clear-sighted in the matter.  Even Luther was a little confused on this point; sometimes he seems to call marriage “a sacrament,” sometimes “a temporal business,” to be left to the state.[332] It was the latter view which tended to prevail.  But at first there was a period of confusion, if not of chaos, in the minds of the Reformers; not only were they not always convinced in their own minds; they were at variance with each other, especially on the