It is lamentable that at this period of the world’s history, nearly two thousand years after the wise legislators of Rome had completed their work, it should still be necessary to conclude that we are to-day only beginning to place marriage on a reasonable and humane basis.  I have repeatedly pointed out how largely the Canon law has been responsible for this arrest of development.  One may say, indeed, that the whole attitude of the Church, after it had once acquired complete worldly dominance, must be held responsible.  In the earlier centuries the attitude of Christianity was, on the whole, admirable.  It held aloft great ideals but it refrained from enforcing those ideals at all costs; thus its ideals remained genuine and could not degenerate into mere hypocritical empty forms; much flexibility was allowed when it seemed to be for human good and made for the avoidance of evil and injustice.  But when the Church attained temporal power, and when that power was concentrated in the hands of Popes who subordinated moral and religious interests to political interests, all the claims of reason and humanity were flung to the winds.  The ideal was no more a fact than it was before, but it was now treated as a fact.  Human relationships remained what they were before, as complicated and as various, but henceforth one rigid pattern, admirable as an ideal but worse than empty as a form, was arbitrarily set up, and all deviations from it treated either as non-existent or damnable.  The vitality was crushed out of the most central human institutions, and they are only to-day beginning to lift their heads afresh.

If—­to sum up—­we consider the course which the regulation of marriage has run during the Christian era, the only period which immediately concerns us, it is not difficult to trace the main outlines.  Marriage began as a private arrangement, which the Church, without being able to control, was willing to bless, as it also blessed many other secular affairs of men, making no undue attempt to limit its natural flexibility to human needs.  Gradually and imperceptibly, however, without the medium of any law, Christianity gained the complete control of marriage, cooerdinated it with its already evolved conceptions of the evil of lust, of the virtue of chastity, of the mortal sin of fornication, and, having through the influence of these dominating conceptions limited the flexibility of marriage in every possible direction, it placed it on a lofty but narrow pedestal as the sacrament of matrimony.  For reasons which by no means lay in the nature of the sexual relationships, but which probably seemed cogent to sacerdotal legislators who assimilated it to ordination, matrimony was declared indissoluble.  Nothing was so easy to enter as the gate of matrimony, but, after the manner of a mouse-trap, it opened inwards and not outwards; once