ivorce goes with pair marriage. Such must inevitably be the case,
if it be admitted that any due reason for divorce ever can exist. The
more poetical and elevated the ideas are which are clustered around
marriage, the more probable it is that experience will produce
disappointment. If one spouse enters wedlock with the belief that the
other is the most superlative man or woman living, the cases must be
very few in which disappointment and disillusion will not result.
Moreover, pair marriage, by its exclusiveness, risks the happiness of
the parties on a very narrow and specific condition of life. The
coercion of this arrangement for many persons must become intolerable.

In the ancient German law there was absolute freedom of divorce by
agreement. The pair could end the relation just as they formed it. In
the laws of the German nations there was little provision for divorce
upon the complaint of the woman. The law of the Langobards allowed it to
her for serious bodily injury.[1260]

+395. Divorce in the Middle Ages.+ It is pretended that the mediaeval
church allowed no divorce. This is utterly untrue. Under the influence
of asceticism the church put marriage under more and more arbitrary
restrictions, going far beyond any rules to be found in the Scriptures,
or in the usages of the early church. Divorce was made more and more
difficult. These two tendencies contradicted each other, for the greater
the restrictions on marriage, the greater the probability that any
marriage would be found to have violated one of them, and therefore to
be _ab initio_ void. This set it aside more absolutely than any divorce
_a vinculo_ could undo it. Also, when there was an ample apparatus of
dispensation by which the rich and great could have their marriages
dissolved, by the use of money or political power, the "law of the
church" was no law. Still further, the mediaeval church, while it had a
doctrine of perfection and ideality for marriage, had also a practical
system of concession to human weakness, by which it could meet cases of
unhappy marriage. In the canon law, divorce and remarriage of the
innocent party has been allowed to the man, in case of adultery,
physical incapacity, leprosy, desertion, captivity, disappearance, and
conspiracy to murder the husband, on the part of the wife; and to the
wife, when the husband's misconduct rendered living with him impossible.
However, a dispensation from the ecclesiastical authority was
requi