ld be
accused of adultery just the same as a wife. In England, late in
the thirteenth century, Bracton speaks of the _concubina
legitima_ as entitled to certain rights and considerations, and
it was the same in other parts of Europe, sometimes for several
centuries later (see Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol.
i, p. 230). The early Christian Church was frequently inclined to
recognize the concubine, at all events if attached to an
unmarried man, for we may trace in the Church "the wish to look
upon every permanent union of man or woman as possessing the
character of a marriage in the eyes of God, and, therefore, in
the judgment of the Church" (art. "Concubinage," Smith and
Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_). This was the
feeling of St. Augustine (who had himself, before his conversion,
had a concubine who was apparently a Christian), and the Council
of Toledo admitted an unmarried man who was faithful to a
concubine. As the law of the Catholic Church grew more and more
rigid, it necessarily lost touch with human needs. It was not so
in the early Church during the great ages of its vital growth. In
those ages even the strenuous general rule of monogamy was
relaxed when such relaxation seemed reasonable. This was so, for
instance, in the case of sexual impotency. Thus early in the
eighth century Gregory II, writing to Boniface, the apostle of
Germany, in answer to a question by the latter, replies that when
a wife is incapable from physical infirmity from fulfilling her
marital duties it is permissible for the husband to take a second
wife, though he must not withdraw maintenance from the first. A
little later Archbishop Egbert of York, in his _Dialogus de
Institutione Ecclesiastica_, though more cautiously, admits that
when one of two married persons is infirm the other, with the
permission of the infirm one, may marry again, but the infirm one
is not allowed to marry again during the other's life. Impotency
at the time of marriage, of course, made the marriage void
without the intervention of any ecclesiastical law. But Aquinas,
and later theologians, allow that an excessive disgust for a wife
justifies a man in regarding himself as impotent in relation to
her. These rules are, of course, quite distinct from the
permissions to break the marriage laws g