“Let us apply the rule of the Spirit to marriage.  If we examine the ideal we shall see clearly that the marriage-service is but a symbol.  Like baptism, it is a worthless and meaningless rite unless the man and the woman have been born again into the Spirit, released from the law.  If they are still, as St. Paul would say, in the flesh, let them have, if they wish, a civil permit to live together, for the Spirit can have nothing to do with such an union.  True to herself, the Church symbolizes the union of her members, the reborn.  She has nothing to do with laws and conventions which are supposedly for the good of society, nor is any union accomplished if those whom she supposedly joins are not reborn.  If they are, the Church can neither make it or dissolve it, but merely confirm and acknowledge the work of the Spirit.  And every work of the Spirit is a sacrament.  Not baptism and communion and marriage only, but every act of life.

“Oh, John,” she exclaimed, her eyes lighting, “I can believe that!  How beautiful a thought!  I see now what is meant when it is said that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.  That is the hourly guidance which is independent of the law.  And how terrible to think that all the spiritual beauty of such a religion should have been hardened into chapter and verse and regulation.  You have put into language what I think of Mr. Bentley, —­that has acts are sacraments . . . .  It is so simple when you explain it this way.  And yet I can see why it was said, too, that we must become as children to understand it.”

“The difficult thing,” replied Holder, gravely, “is to retain it, to hold it after we have understood it—­even after we have experienced it.  To continue to live in the Spirit demands all our effort, all our courage and patience and faith.  We cannot, as you say, promise to love for life.  But the marriage service, interpreted, means that we will use all our human endeavour, with the help of the Spirit, to remain in what may be called the reborn state, since it is by the Spirit alone that true marriage is sanctified.  When the Spirit is withdrawn, man and woman are indeed divorced.

“The words ‘a sense of duty’ belong to moral philosophy and not to religion.  Love annuls them.  I do not mean to decry them, but the reborn are lifted far above them by the subversion of the will by which our will is submitted to God’s.  It is so we develop, and become, as it were, God.  And hence those who are not married in the Spirit are not spiritually man and wife.  No consecration has taken place, Church or no Church.  If rebirth occurs later, to either or both, the individual conscience—­which is the Spirit, must decide whether, as regards each other, they are bound or free, and we must stand or fall by that.  Men object that this is opening the door to individualism.  What they fail to see is that the door is open, wide, to-day and can never again be closed:  that the law of the naturally born is losing its power, that the worn-out authority of the Church is being set at naught because that authority was devised by man to keep in check those who were not reborn.  The only check to material individualism is spiritual individualism, and the reborn man or woman cannot act to the detriment of his fellow-creatures.”