r Dollinger (_Contemp. Review_, May 1869) will probably assign
the palm to the English scholar. A more general view points in the same
direction. It is quite true that under the Mosaic law antenuptial
incontinence was, as was also adultery, punishable with death. But when
we consider the effect of adultery not only as a moral fault, but as
violating the solemn contract of marriage and vitiating its objects, it
is inconceivable that Christ, in employing a term of general import,
intended to limit it to one kind, and that the less serious, of
incontinence.

_Effect of Christianity on the Law of Rome._--The modification in the
civil law of Rome effected by Justinian under the joint influence of the
previous law of Rome and that of Christianity was remarkable. Gibbon has
summed up the change effected in the law of Rome with characteristic
accuracy: "The Christian princes were the first who specified the just
causes of a private divorce; their institutions from Constantine to
Justinian appear to fluctuate between the customs of the empire and the
wishes of the Church; and the author of the Novels too frequently
reforms the jurisprudence of the Code and Pandects." Divorce by mutual
consent, hitherto, as we have seen, absolutely free, was prohibited
(Nov. 117) except in three cases: (1) when the husband was impotent; (2)
when either husband or wife desired to enter a monastery; and (3) when
either of them was in captivity for a certain length of time. It is
obvious that the two first of these exceptions might well commend
themselves to the mind of the Church, the former as being rather a
matter of nullity of marriage than of divorce, the latter as admitting
the paramount claims of the Church on its adherents, and not
inconsistent with the spirit of the words of St Paul himself, who
clearly contemplated a separation between husband and wife as allowable
in case either of them did not hold the Christian faith (1 Cor. vii.
12). At a later period Justinian placed a further restriction or even
prohibition on divorce by consent by enacting that spouses dissolving a
marriage by mutual consent should forfeit all their property, and be
confined for life in a monastery, which was to receive one-third of the
forfeited property, the remaining two-thirds going to the children of
the marriage. The cause stated for this remarkable alteration of the
law, and the abandonment of the conception of marriage as a civil
contract _ut non Dei judiciu