of man or woman as possessing the character of a marriage in the eyes of God, and, therefore, in the judgment of the Church” (art.  “Concubinage,” Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities).  This was the feeling of St. Augustine (who had himself, before his conversion, had a concubine who was apparently a Christian), and the Council of Toledo admitted an unmarried man who was faithful to a concubine.  As the law of the Catholic Church grew more and more rigid, it necessarily lost touch with human needs.  It was not so in the early Church during the great ages of its vital growth.  In those ages even the strenuous general rule of monogamy was relaxed when such relaxation seemed reasonable.  This was so, for instance, in the case of sexual impotency.  Thus early in the eighth century Gregory II, writing to Boniface, the apostle of Germany, in answer to a question by the latter, replies that when a wife is incapable from physical infirmity from fulfilling her marital duties it is permissible for the husband to take a second wife, though he must not withdraw maintenance from the first.  A little later Archbishop Egbert of York, in his Dialogus de Institutione Ecclesiastica, though more cautiously, admits that when one of two married persons is infirm the other, with the permission of the infirm one, may marry again, but the infirm one is not allowed to marry again during the other’s life.  Impotency at the time of marriage, of course, made the marriage void without the intervention of any ecclesiastical law.  But Aquinas, and later theologians, allow that an excessive disgust for a wife justifies a man in regarding himself as impotent in relation to her.  These rules are, of course, quite distinct from the permissions to break the marriage laws granted to kings and princes; such permissions do not count as evidence of the Church’s rules, for, as the Council of Constantinople prudently decided in 809, “Divine law can do nothing against Kings” (art.  “Bigamy,” Dictionary of Christian Antiquities).  The law of monogamy was also relaxed in cases of enforced or voluntary desertion.  Thus the Council of Vermerie (752) enacted that if a wife will not accompany her husband when he is compelled to follow his lord into another land, he may marry again, provided he sees no hope of returning.  Theodore of Canterbury (688), again, pronounces that if a wife is carried away by the enemy and her husband cannot redeem her, he may marry again after an interval of a year, or, if there is a chance of redeeming her, after an interval of five years; the wife may do the same.  Such rules, though not general, show, as Meyrick points out (art.  “Marriage,” Dictionary of Christian Antiquities), a willingness “to meet particular cases as they arise.”

As the Canon law grew rigid and the Catholic Church lost its vital adaptibility, sexual variations ceased to be recognized within its sphere.  We have to wait for the Reformation for