arriage was grudging, illiberal, and old-fashioned,
approximating to that of her father, Henry VIII (as witnessed,
for instance, in her decided opposition to the marriage of the
clergy), permanently affected English marriage law. It became
less liberal than that of other Protestant countries, and closer
to that of Catholic countries.

The reform of marriage attempted by the Puritans began in England
in 1644, when an Act was passed asserting "marriage to be no
sacrament, nor peculiar to the Church of God, but common to
mankind and of public interest to every Commonwealth." The Act
added, notwithstanding, that it was expedient marriage should be
solemnized by "a lawful minister of the Word." The more radical
Act of 1653 swept away this provision, and made marriage purely
secular. The banns were to be published (by registrars specially
appointed) in the Church, or (if the parties desired) the
market-place. The marriage was to be performed by a Justice of
the Peace; the age of consent to marriage for a man was made
sixteen, for a woman fourteen (Scobell's _Acts and Ordinances_,
pp. 86, 236). The Restoration abolished this sensible Act, and
reintroduced Canon-law traditions, but the Puritan conception of
marriage was carried over to America, where it took root and
flourished.

It was out of Puritanism, moreover, as represented by Milton, that the
first genuinely modern though as yet still imperfect conception of the
marriage relationship was destined to emerge. The early Reformers in this
matter acted mainly from an obscure instinct of natural revolt in an
environment of plebeian materialism. The Puritans were moved by their
feeling for simplicity and civil order as the conditions for religious
freedom. Milton, in his _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, published in
1643, when he was thirty-five years of age, proclaimed the supremacy of
the substance of marriage over the form of it, and the spiritual autonomy
of the individual in the regulation of that form. He had grasped the
meaning of that conception of personal responsibility which is the
foundation of sexual relationships as they are beginning to appear to men
to-day. If Milton had left behind him only his writings on marriage and
divorce they would have sufficed to stamp him with the seal of genius.
Christendom had to wait a century and a half before another man of genius
of the fir