We do not base our action on considerations of authority such as move
the Churches of Christendom. It is not because Jesus assisted at a
wedding breakfast and performed an alleged wonder; not because the
Apostle Paul calls marriage "a great mystery in Christ and the Church,"
but because both Jesus and Paul and the Churches express a truth of
nature itself, that the union of man and woman is not, and cannot be,
the herding of animals; that the bestowal of the body cannot but be the
outward symbol of an invisible bond which is the very soul and life of
the contract. We thus go behind all Churches and apostles and ascend
to the very roots of Nature herself, and discern in the golden glory
wherewith she surrounds the ideal marriage the significance of her
intentions in its regard--that it is her true and real Sacrament, that
her sons and daughters are themselves its ministers, for they alone are
kindled with the heavenly fire; that not the Church, not the priest nor
ritual celebrates it, but these twain made one by that same

Love which moves the earth and heavens and all the stars.

That man has so regarded marriage as a sacred and sacramental fact is
authenticated by history in an abundantly available form. No doubt,
ages must have passed before he emerged from his animalesque condition
and abandoned polygynous and polygamous manners, the marriage by
capture and purchase, which were the stages which mark the historical
evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed
away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that
monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was
potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert
Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man
and woman. What the institution _could_ become, what it _has_ become,
shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In the nobler
days of Rome, under the republic and early empire, the same lofty
conception animated her best sons. It was the decay of reverence for
the sacred bond, the era when a woman's years were told by the number
of her divorces, which called forth the solemn warnings of her moralist
poets and philosophers, and ultimately brought about the emasculation
of the nation's manhood and the downfall of the empire. We have not
the remotest doubt but that a similar contempt in modern Europe for
Nature's ordinance would involve us in the sa