The transference of marriage from the Church to the State which, in the lands where it first occurred, we owe to Protestantism and, in the English-speaking lands, especially to Puritanism, while a necessary stage, had the unfortunate result of secularizing the sexual relationships.  That is to say, it ignored the transcendent element in love which is really the essential part of such relationships, and it concentrated attention on those formal and accidental parts of marriage which can alone be dealt with in a rigid and precise manner, and can alone properly form the subject of contracts.  The Canon law, fantastic and impossible as it became in many of its developments, at least insisted on the natural and actual fact of marriage as, above all, a bodily union, while, at the same time, it regarded that union as no mere secular business contract but a sacred and exalted function, a divine fact, and the symbol of the most divine fact in the world.  We are returning to-day to the Canonist’s conception of marriage on a higher and freer plane, bringing back the exalted conception of the Canon law, yet retaining the individualism which the Puritan wrongly thought he could secure on the basis of mere secularization, while, further, we recognize that the whole process belongs to the private sphere of moral responsibility.  As Hobhouse has well said, in tracing the evolutionary history of the modern conception of marriage, the sacramental idea of marriage has again emerged but on a higher plane; “from being a sacrament in the magical, it has become one in the ethical, sense.”  We are thus tending towards, though we have not yet legally achieved, marriage made and maintained by consent, “a union between two free and responsible persons in which the equal rights of both are maintained."[363]

It is supposed by some that to look upon sexual union as a sacrament is necessarily to accept the ancient Catholic view, embodied in the Canon law, that matrimony is indissoluble.  That is, however, a mistake.  Even the Canonists themselves were never able to put forward any coherent and consistent ground for the indissolubility of matrimony which could commend itself rationally, while Luther and Milton and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who maintained the religious and sacred nature of sexual union—­though they were cautious about using the term sacrament on account of its ecclesiastical implications—­so far from believing that its sanctity involved indissolubility, argued in the reverse sense.  This point of view may be defended even from a strictly Protestant standpoint.  “I take it,” Mr. G.C.  Maberly says, “that the Prayer Book definition of a sacrament, ’the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,’ is generally accepted.  In marriage the legal and physical unions are the outward and visible signs, while the inward and spiritual grace is the God-given love that makes the union of heart and soul:  and it is precisely because I take this view of marriage