t together; those that were separated are
now united.' Marriage ceremonies in all stages of culture may be
called religious with as much propriety as any ceremony whatever.
Those who were separated are now joined together, those who were
mutually taboo now break the taboo." Thus marriage ceremonies
prevent sin and neutralize danger.

The Catholic conception of marriage was, it is clear, in
essentials precisely the primitive conception. Christianity drew
the sacramental idea from the archaic traditions in popular
consciousness, and its own ecclesiastical contribution lay in
slowly giving that idea a formal and rigid shape, and in
declaring it indissoluble. As among savages, it was in the act of
consent that the essence of the sacrament lay; the intervention
of the priest was not, in principle, necessary to give marriage
its religiously binding character. The essence of the sacrament
was mutual acceptance of each other by the man and the woman, as
husband and wife, and technically the priest who presided at the
ceremony was simply a witness of the sacrament. The essential
fact being thus the mental act of consent, the sacrament of
matrimony had the peculiar character of being without any outward
and visible sign. Perhaps it was this fact, instinctively felt
as a weakness, which led to the immense emphasis on the
indissolubility of the sacrament of matrimony, already
established by St. Augustine. The Canonists brought forward
various arguments to account for that indissolubility, and a
frequent argument has always been the Scriptural application of
the term "one flesh" to married couples; but the favorite
argument of the Canonists was that matrimony represents the union
of Christ with the Church; that is indissoluble, and therefore
its image must be indissoluble (Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 64).
In part, also, one may well believe, the idea of the
indissolubility of marriage suggested itself to the
ecclesiastical mind by a natural association of ideas: the vow of
virginity in monasticism was indissoluble; ought not the vow of
sexual relationship in matrimony to be similarly indissoluble? It
appears that it was not until 1164, in Peter Lombard's
_Sentences_, that clear and formal recognition is found of
matrimony as one of the seven sacraments (Howard, op. cit., vol.
i, p