84 The Growth of the Marriage Relation. 



ment of which the marriage relation is capable. It places 

 husband and wife on a footing of perfect equality, and they 

 are united by a spiritual as well as a social bond, which is 

 supposed to constitute for both of them a perpetual engage- 

 ment. Marriage was to the ancients, however, something 

 more than the uniting in heart and hand of two individ- 

 uals; it was the mode provided by nature for continuing 

 the succession of persons required to perform the rites of 

 the religion of the hearth and of ancestors. The continu- 

 ity of the family was thus regarded as the first and holiest 

 of duties. 



Under the influence of the ideas embodied in the teach- 

 ing of the Persian Zoroaster, the Jews not only acquired 

 a purer faith, but they gradually replaced their early 

 polygyny with monogamy. The marriage relation with them, 

 and therefore Avith the primitive Christians, retained its 

 religious sanction, and the law of marriage was expressed 

 in the words of Genesis, "a man shall leave his father and 

 mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be 

 one flesh." There were, however, ideas afloat in the East 

 relative to marriage which were especially attractive to 

 many persons in the early Christian church. In the ancient 

 mysteries it was taught that the association of tlie soul 

 Avith the material body Avas a source of spiritual impurity, 

 from Avhich it had to be freed. Birth, if not an evil, Avas 

 the cause of evil, and it was not going much further to 

 assert that that to Avhich birth Avas due Avas also evil. 

 These ideas strongly influenced early Christianity, and its 

 followers, expecting also an early return of Jesus to earth, 

 and the end of the existing order of things, regarded mai'- 

 riage as at least useless. St. Paul appears to have been of 

 this opinion, and, although he authorized marriage Avheu 

 expedient, yet he did not look upon it as so high a state as 

 virginity ; in Avhich he Avas folloAved by many of the 

 Fathers of the Churcli. 



It Avould have been a misfortune for Christianity, no less 

 than for society, if those ideas had retained their vitality. 

 After the fire of Christian zeal had Avell nigh burned out, 

 hoAvever, marrijbge Avas restored to its proper place as a 

 sacred bond between two individuals, and a natural pro- 

 A'ision for the perpetuation of the race through the family. 

 It felt, moreoA^er, the retiuing influence of the emotion 

 Avhich, having at first been appropriated almost entirely to 



