f sexual
intercourse only; he also turns against the idea that marriage and
Church have anything in common. In this he stood squarely on the ground
of the olden days, which considered marriage an act of free will on the
part of those who engaged in it, and that did not concern the Church. On
this head he said: "Know, therefore, that marriage is an outside affair,
as any other earthly act. The same as I am free to eat, drink, sleep,
walk, ride, deal, speak and trade with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk or a
heretic, _likewise am I free to enter into and remain in wedlock with
one of them. Turn your back upon the fool laws that forbid such a
thing_.... A heathen is a man and woman, created by God in perfect form,
as well as St. Peter and St. Paul and St. Luke; be then silent for a
loose and false Christian that you are." Luther, like other Reformers,
pronounced himself against all limitation of marriage, and he was for
also allowing the re-union of divorced couples, against which the Church
was up in arms. He said: "As to the manner in which marriage and divorce
are to be conducted among us, I claim that it should be made the
business of the jurists, and placed under the jurisdiction of earthly
concerns, because marriage is but an earthly and outside matter." It was
in keeping with this view that, not until the close of the seventeenth
century, was marriage by the Church made obligatory under Protestantism.
Until then so-called "conscience marriage" held good, i. e., the simple
mutual obligation to consider each other man and wife, and to mean to
live in wedlock. Such a marriage was considered by German law to be
legally entered into. Luther even went so far that he conceded to the
unsatisfied party--even if that be the woman--the right to seek
satisfaction outside of the marriage bonds "in order to satisfy nature,
which cannot be crossed."[47] This conception of marriage is the same
that prevailed in antiquity, and that came up later during the French
Revolution. Luther here set up maxims that will arouse the strongest
indignation of a large portion of our "respectable men and women," who,
in their religious zeal, are so fond of appealing to him. In his
treatise "On Married Life,"[48] he says: "If an impotent man falls to
the lot of a hearty woman, and she still cannot openly take another, and
does not wish to marry again, she shall say unto her husband: 'Lo, dear
husband, thou shalt not be wronged by me. Thou hast deceived me an