in there was no way out alive.  The Church’s regulation of marriage while, like the celibacy of the clergy, it was a success from the point of view of ecclesiastical politics, and even at first from the point of view of civilization, for it at least introduced order into a chaotic society, was in the long run a failure from the point of view of society and morals.  On the one hand it drifted into absurd subtleties and quibbles; on the other, not being based on either reason or humanity, it had none of that vital adaptability to the needs of life, which early Christianity, while holding aloft austere ideals, still largely retained.  On the side of tradition this code of marriage law became awkward and impracticable; on the biological side it was hopelessly false.  The way was thus prepared for the Protestant reintroduction of the conception of marriage as a contract, that conception being, however, brought forward less on its merits than as a protest against the difficulties and absurdities of the Catholic Canon law.  The contractive view, which still largely persists even to-day, speedily took over much of the Canon law doctrines of marriage, becoming in practice a kind of reformed and secularized Canon law.  It was somewhat more adapted to modern needs, but it retained much of the rigidity of the Catholic marriage without its sacramental character, and it never made any attempt to become more than nominally contractive.  It has been of the nature of an incongruous compromise and has represented a transitional phase towards free private marriage.  We can recognize that phase in the tendency, well marked in all civilized lands, to an ever increasing flexibility of marriage.  The idea, and even the fact, of marriage by consent and divorce by failure of that consent, which we are now approaching, has never indeed been quite extinct.  In the Latin countries it has survived with the tradition of Roman law; in the English-speaking countries it is bound up with the spirit of Puritanism which insists that in the things that concern the individual alone the individual himself shall be the supreme judge.  That doctrine as applied to marriage was in England magnificently asserted by the genius of Milton, and in America it has been a leaven which is still working in marriage legislation towards an inevitable goal which is scarcely yet in sight.  The marriage system of the future, as it moves along its present course, will resemble the old Christian system in that it will recognize the sacred and sacramental character of the sexual relationship, and it will resemble the civil conception in that it will insist that marriage, so far as it involves procreation, shall be publicly registered by the State.  But in opposition to the Church it will recognize that marriage, in so far as it is purely a sexual relationship, is a private matter the conditions of which must be left to the persons who alone are concerned in it; and in opposition to the civil theory it will recognize that marriage