If from the point we have now reached we look back at the question of divorce we see that, as the modern aspects of the marriage relationship becomes more clearly realized by the community, that question will be immensely simplified. Since marriage is not a mere contract but a fact of conduct, and even a sacred fact, the free participation of both parties is needed to maintain it. To introduce the idea of delinquency and punishment into divorce, to foster mutual recrimination, to publish to the world the secrets of the heart or the senses, is not only immoral, it is altogether out of place. In the question as to when a marriage has ceased to be a marriage the two parties concerned can alone be the supreme judges; the State, if the State is called in, can but register the sentence they pronounce, merely seeing to it that no injustice is involved in the carrying out of that sentence.[364]
In discussing in the previous chapter the direction in which sexual morality tends to develop with the development of civilization we came to the conclusion that in its main lines it involved, above all, personal responsibility. A relationship fixed among savage peoples by social custom which none dare break, and in a higher stage of culture by formal laws which must be observed in the letter even if broken in the spirit, becomes gradually transferred to the sphere of individual moral responsibility. Such a transference is necessarily meaningless, and indeed impossible, unless the increasing stringency of the moral bond is accompanied by the decreasing stringency of the formal bond. It is only by the process of loosening the artificial restraints that the natural restraints can exert their full control. That process takes place in two ways, in part on the basis of the indifference to formal marriage which has marked the masses of the population everywhere and doubtless stretches back to the tenth century before the domination of ecclesiastical matrimony began, and partly by the progressive modification of marriage laws which were made necessary by the needs of the propertied classes anxious to secure the State recognition of their unions. The whole process is necessarily a gradual and indeed imperceptible process. It is impossible to fix definitely the dates of the stages by which the Church effected the immense revolution by which it grasped, and eventually transferred to the State, the complete control of marriage, for that revolution was effected without