he real marriage. During the tenth century
(at all events in Italy and France) it was beginning to become customary
to celebrate the first part of the real nuptials, still a purely temporal
act, outside the church door. Soon this was followed by the regular
bride-mass, directly applicable to the occasion, inside the church. By the
twelfth century the priest directed the ceremony, now involving an
imposing ritual, which began outside the church and ended with the bridal
mass inside. By the thirteenth century, the priest, superseding the
guardians of the young couple, himself officiated through the whole
ceremony. Up to that time marriage had been a purely private business
transaction. Thus, after more than a millennium of Christianity, not by
law but by the slow growth of custom, ecclesiastical marriage was
established.[325]

It was undoubtedly an event of very great importance not merely for the
Church but for the whole history of European marriage even down to to-day.
The whole of our public method of celebrating marriage to-day is based on
that of the Catholic Church as established in the twelfth century and
formulated in the Canon law. Even the publication of banns has its origin
here, and the fact that in our modern civil marriage the public ceremony
takes place in an office and not in a Church may disguise but cannot
alter the fact that it is the direct and unquestionable descendant of the
public ecclesiastical ceremony which embodied the slow and subtle
triumph--so slow and subtle that its history is difficult to trace--of
Christian priests over the private affairs of men and women. Before they
set themselves to this task marriage everywhere was the private business
of the persons concerned; when they had completed their task,--and it was
not absolutely complete until the Council of Trent,--a private marriage
had become a sin and almost a crime.[326]

It may seem a matter for surprise that the Church which, as we know, had
shown an ever greater tendency to reverence virginity and to cast
contumely on the sexual relationship, should yet, parallel with that
movement and with the growing influence of asceticism, have shown so great
an anxiety to capture marriage and to confer on it a public, dignified,
and religious character. There was, however, no contradiction. The factors
that were constituting European marriage, taken as a whole, were indeed of
very diverse characters and often involved unreconciled contradictio