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communities whose every-day actions Avere, to say, so 

 saturated with religious feelings that no betrothal took 

 place without the concurrence and sanction of the elders. 

 That this ecclesiastic or rather religious concurrence took 

 place more at the betrothal than at the wedding itself, 

 is a fact which manifests the conviction that the real 

 union of the jDcrsons commenced with their mutual con- 

 sense to belong to each other, and that the marriage, in a 

 mere religious point of view, is completed by that con- 

 sense. With this view, the contemporaiy heathen world 

 of Rome entirely agreed, as we have shewn. That which 

 was an internal religious want in the earlier times of 

 Christianity, became a habit in the later ages. Every 

 betrothal was then regularly announced to the Christian 

 clergy, and every marriage blessed by them. This ex- 

 plains the absence of any law, civil or ecclesiastic, that 

 commanded the sanction of religion for the marriage for 

 some time after Justinian, as the bishops had no need to 

 enforce by laws what was voluntarily and heartily given 

 to them ; and the civil authorities were too much accus- 

 tomed to consider matrimony as a mere private contract, 

 based upon conditions which lie beyond the civil power. 

 When, after a further development of the worldly organi- 

 zation of the church, marriage and its relations came 

 under the ecclesiastic jurisdiction, a far greater importance 

 was still laid upon the publication of the bann and the 

 consecration of the betrothed, than upon the wedding 

 itself If I am not mistaken, it is first in the wedding- 

 liturgies of the fifteenth century that we read the words 

 " ego vos conjugo in matrimomum m nomine Dei^^ when the 

 priest performed the proper act of copulation as proxy of 

 God, a long time after matrimony had been considered as 

 a sacrament in the church, though it Avas only legally 

 raised to that dignity in the Council of Trent. 



