otions of the duties or the
privileges involved by the "contract" of marriage, with no more attempt to
analyze the meaning of the term "contract" in this connection than the
Protestant Reformers made, but it can scarcely be said that these writers
have yet reached the alphabet of the subject they dogmatize about.

The transference of marriage from the Church to the State which, in the
lands where it first occurred, we owe to Protestantism and, in the
English-speaking lands, especially to Puritanism, while a necessary stage,
had the unfortunate result of secularizing the sexual relationships. That
is to say, it ignored the transcendent element in love which is really the
essential part of such relationships, and it concentrated attention on
those formal and accidental parts of marriage which can alone be dealt
with in a rigid and precise manner, and can alone properly form the
subject of contracts. The Canon law, fantastic and impossible as it became
in many of its developments, at least insisted on the natural and actual
fact of marriage as, above all, a bodily union, while, at the same time,
it regarded that union as no mere secular business contract but a sacred
and exalted function, a divine fact, and the symbol of the most divine
fact in the world. We are returning to-day to the Canonist's conception of
marriage on a higher and freer plane, bringing back the exalted conception
of the Canon law, yet retaining the individualism which the Puritan
wrongly thought he could secure on the basis of mere secularization,
while, further, we recognize that the whole process belongs to the private
sphere of moral responsibility. As Hobhouse has well said, in tracing the
evolutionary history of the modern conception of marriage, the sacramental
idea of marriage has again emerged but on a higher plane; "from being a
sacrament in the magical, it has become one in the ethical, sense." We are
thus tending towards, though we have not yet legally achieved, marriage
made and maintained by consent, "a union between two free and responsible
persons in which the equal rights of both are maintained."[363]

It is supposed by some that to look upon sexual union as a
sacrament is necessarily to accept the ancient Catholic view,
embodied in the Canon law, that matrimony is indissoluble. That
is, however, a mistake. Even the Canonists themselves were never
able to put forward any coherent and consistent ground for the
ind