age, which, while practically terminating the marriage relation,
proceed in law on the basis of the marriage never having been legally
established.

The conditions under which, in different communities, divorce has at
different times been permitted, vary with the aspects in which the
relation of marriage (q.v.) has been regarded. When marriage has been
deemed to be the acquisition by the husband of property in the wife, or
when it has been regarded as a mere agreement between persons capable
both to form and to dissolve that contract, we find that marriage has
been dissoluble at the will of the husband, or by agreement of the
husband and wife. Yet even in these cases the interest of the whole
community in the purity of marriage relations, in the pecuniary bearings
of this particular contract, and the condition of children, has led to
the imposition of restrictions on, and the attachment of conditions to,
the termination of the obligations consequent on a marriage legally
contracted. But the main restrictions on liberty of divorce have arisen
from the conception of marriage entertained by religions, and especially
by one religion. Christianity has had no greater practical effect on the
life of mankind than in its belief that marriage is no mere civil
contract, but a vow in the sight of God binding the parties by
obligations of conscience above and beyond those of civil law.
Translating this conception into practice, Christianity not only
profoundly modified the legal conditions of divorce as formulated in the
Roman civil law, but in its own canon law defined its own rule of
divorce, going so far as in the Western (at least in its unreformed
condition), though not the Eastern, branch of Christendom to forbid all
complete divorces, that is to say, all dissolutions of marriage carrying
with them the right to remarry.

HISTORY

_The Roman Law of Divorce before Justinian._--The history of divorce,
therefore, practically begins with the law of Rome. It took its earliest
colour from that conception of the _patria potestas_, or the power of
the head of the family over its members, which enters so deeply into the
jurisprudence of ancient Rome. The wife was transferred at marriage to
the authority of her husband, _in manus_, and consequently became so far
subject to him that he could, at his will, renounce his rule over her,
and terminate his companionship, subject at least to an adjustment of
the pecuniary rights which were