ns.
But so far as the central efforts of the ecclesiastical legislators were
concerned, there was a definite and intelligible point of view. The very
depreciation of the sexual instinct involved the necessity, since the
instinct could not be uprooted, of constituting for it a legitimate
channel, so that ecclesiastical matrimony was, it has been said,
"analogous to a license to sell intoxicating liquors."[327] Moreover,
matrimony exhibited the power of the Church to confer on the license a
dignity and distinction which would clearly separate it from the general
stream of lust. Sexual enjoyment is impure, the faithful cannot partake of
it until it has been purified by the ministrations of the Church. The
solemnization of marriage was the necessary result of the sanctification
of virginity. It became necessary to sanctify marriage also, and hence
was developed the indissoluble sacrament of matrimony. The conception of
marriage as a religious sacrament, a conception of far-reaching influence,
is the great contribution of the Catholic Church to the history of
marriage.

It is important to remember that, while Christianity brought the
idea of marriage as a sacrament into the main stream of the
institutional history of Europe, that idea was merely developed,
not invented, by the Church. It is an ancient and even primitive
idea. The Jews believed that marriage is a magico-religious bond,
having in it something mystical resembling a sacrament, and that
idea, says Durkheim (_L'Annee Sociologique_, eighth year, 1905,
p. 419), is perhaps very archaic, and hangs on to the generally
magic character of sex relations. "The mere act of union,"
Crawley remarks (_The Mystic Rose_, p. 318) concerning savages,
"is potentially a marriage ceremony of the sacramental kind....
One may even credit the earliest animistic men with some such
vague conception before any ceremony became crystallized." The
essence of a marriage ceremony, the same writer continues, "is
the 'joining together' of a man and a woman; in the words of our
English service, 'for this cause shall a man leave his father and
mother and shall be joined unto his wife; and they two shall be
one flesh.' At the other side of the world, amongst the Orang
Benuas, these words are pronounced by an elder, when a marriage
is solemnized: 'Listen all ye that are present; those that were
distant are now brough