Tlie Growth of the Marriage Relation. 85 



the founder of Christianity, was now shown also towards 

 the life-partner in the cares and duties of earthly existence. 

 The marriage relation was thus elevated and spiritualized, 

 although it is questionable whether it was more so than 

 with the early Aryans, to whom it was the most sacred of 

 engagements and therefore the most difficult to be absolved 

 from. Through the centuries which elapsed after the 

 rehabilitation of marriage it again suffered, but in a differ- 

 ent direction. Among the higher classes especially it 

 lost much of its spirituality ; although it had become 

 a sacrament of the church, and was held to be indissoluble, 

 except in very speciat cases. 



Since the Eeformation, the Protestant sects have departed, 

 in their ideas of the marriage relation, from the views ex- 

 pressed by the founder of Christianity. The marriage cere- 

 mony having ceased to be regarded by them as a sacrament, 

 or even by many Protestants as an ecclesiastical office, 

 marriage itself has gradually lost its indissoluble nature, 

 and hence the practice of divorce for causes other than 

 adultery has been introduced. This is reverting to what 

 was customary in the ancient world before the establish- 

 ment of Christianity, and so long as the power of divorce 

 is not abused it is undoubtedly required by the laws of 

 social progress. Ill-assorted marriages cannot have been 

 "made in heaven," nor even, as the Japanese suppose, by 

 ancestral spirits on earth; and they should be dissolved 

 when their failure is not due to fraudulent design. The 

 State should intervene to prevent the success of attempted 

 fraud, but it should provide for divorce by simple, though 

 not hasty means, in other cases, treating the contract of 

 marriage as it would any other contract, and giving as great 

 facilities for setting it aside, if its terms cannot be properly 

 carried out, as it does for the contract to be entered into. 



The State should also deal with questions of marriage 

 disability consequent on relationship. The descriptive 

 system, under which kinship is traced through both father 

 and mother would, if the old rule of marriage were en- 

 forced, exclude from intermarriage all persons of kin 

 through either parent, however distantly related. This 

 would be carrying the objection to consanguineous unions 

 which seems justifiable on natural grounds* much too 



*Mr. George H. Darwin, as the result of his inquiries, came to the conclu- 

 sion that " various maladies take an easy hold of the offsjjrinf^ of consanguine- 

 ous marriages," although tliey are probably as prolific as ordinary ones. 



