before and after marriage, enjoyed great freedom, far more than was afforded either by Christianity or the English Common law.  “Practically either husband or wife could separate when either one or both chose” (Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People, p. 214).  It was so also in ancient Ireland.  Women held a very high position, and the marriage tie was very free, so as to be practically, it would appear, dissoluble by mutual consent.  So far as the Brehon laws show, says Ginnell (The Brehon Laws, p. 212), “the marriage relation was extremely loose, and divorce was as easy, and could be obtained on as slight ground, as is now the case in some of the States of the American Union.  It appears to have been obtained more easily by the wife than by the husband.  When obtained on her petition, she took away with her all the property she had brought her husband, all her husband had settled upon her on their marriage, and in addition so much of her husband’s property as her industry appeared to have entitled her to.”

Even in early French history we find that divorce by mutual consent was very common.  It was sufficient to prepare in duplicate a formal document to this effect:  “Since between N. and his wife there is discord instead of charity according to God, and that in consequence it is impossible for them to live together, it has pleased both to separate, and they have accordingly done so.”  Each of the parties was thus free either to retire into a cloister or to contract another union (E. de la Bedolliere, Histoire des Moeurs des Francais, vol. i, p. 317).  Such a practice, however it might accord with the germinal principle of consent embodied in the Canon law, was far too opposed to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the sacramental indissolubility of matrimony to be permanently allowed, and it was completely crushed out.

The fact that we so rarely find divorce by mutual consent in Christendom until the beginning of the nineteenth century, that then it required a man of stupendous and revolutionary genius like Napoleon to reintroduce it, and that even he was unable to do so effectually, is clearly due to the immense victory which the ascetic spirit of Christianity, as firmly embodied in the Canon law, had gained over the souls and bodies of men.  So subjugated were European traditions and institutions by this spirit that even the volcanic emotional uprising of the Reformation, as we have seen, could not shake it off.  When Protestant States naturally resumed the control of secular affairs which had been absorbed by the Church, and rescued from ecclesiastical hands those things which belonged to the sphere of the individual conscience, it might have seemed that marriage and divorce would have been among the first concerns to be thus transferred.  Yet, as we know, England was about as much enslaved to the spirit and even the letter of Canon law in the nineteenth as in the fourteenth century, and even to-day English law, though no longer supported by the feeling of the masses, clings to the same traditions.