master and in ancient times they were always
proud to "find favor in his eyes." Thus wives, concubines, and slave
women form three recognized ranks of female companions.

+435. The church elevated the notion of marriage.+ In all the ancient
civilized states marriage was an affair of property interests and rank.
The public ceremony was needed in order to establish rights of property
and inheritance, legitimacy, and civil rights. The Christian church of
the Middle Ages had to find a ground for its own intervention. This it
did by emphasizing the mystic element in marriage, and developing all
the symbolism of the Bible which could be applied to this subject and
all the biographical details which touched upon it,--Adam and Eve,
Tobias, Joseph and Mary, the one-flesh idea, the symbolism of Christ and
the church, etc. Thus a sentimental-poetical-mystical conception of
marriage was superimposed on the materialistic-sensual conception of
it. The church affirmed that marriage was a "sacrament." A half-dozen
different explanations of "sacrament" in this connection could be
quoted. It is impossible to tell what it means. The church, however, by
its policy, contributed greatly to the development of the nobler
conception of marriage in modern mores. The materialistic view of it has
been left decently covered, and the conception of wedlock as a fusion of
two lives and interests into affectionate cooperation, by the sympathy
of character and tastes, has become the ideal. The church did much to
bring about this change. For an age which attributed a vague and awful
efficacy to a "sacrament," and was familiar, in church matters, with
such parallelisms as that alleged between marriage and the union of
Christ with his church, it is very probable that the church "fostered a
feeling that a lifelong union of one man and one woman is, under all
circumstances, the single form of intercourse between the sexes which is
not illegitimate; and this conviction has acquired the force of a primal
moral intuition."[1379] What has chiefly aided this effect has been the
rise to wealth and civil power of the middle class of the later Middle
Ages, in whose mores such views had become fixed without much direct
church influence.

+436. The decrees of Trent about marriage.+ It was not until the decrees
of Trent (1563) that the church established in its law the sacerdotal
theory of marriage in place of the theory of the canon law. The motive
at Trent was to pr