Page:Catechismoftrent.djvu/236

 the dignity of a sacrament is intended for the procreation and education of a people in the religion and worship of the true God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ. When the Redeemer would exemplify the close union that subsists between him and his Church, and his boundless love towards us, he declares this divine mystery principally by alluding to the holy union of man and wife; and the aptitude of the illustration is evinced by this, that of all human relations no one is so binding as that of marriage, and those who stand in that relation are united in the closest bonds of affection and love. Hence the Sacred Scriptures, by assimilating it to marriage, frequently place before us this divine union of Christ with his Church.

That marriage is a sacrament has been at all times held by the church as a certain and well ascertained truth; and in this she is supported by the authority of the Apostle in his Epistle to the Ephesians: " Husbands," says he, " should love their wives, as their own bodies: he who loveth his wife, loveth himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ doth the Church, for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ, and in the Church." When the Apostle says: " This is a great sacrament," he means, no doubt, to designate marriage; as if he had said: The conjugal union between man and wife, of which God is the author, is a sacrament, that is, a sacred sign of the holy union that subsists between Christ and his Church. That this is the true meaning of his words is shown by the Holy Fathers who have interpreted the passage; and the Council of Trent has given to it the same interpretation. The husband therefore is evidently compared by the Apostle to Christ, the wife to the Church; "the man is head of the woman, as Christ is of the Church;" and hence the husband should love his wife, and again, the wife should love and respect her husband, for " Christ loved his Church, and gave himself for her;" and the Church, as the same Apostle teaches, is subject to Christ.

That this sacrament signifies and confers grace, and in this the nature of a sacrament principally consists, we learn from these words of the Council of Trent: " The grace which perfects that natural love, and confirms that indissoluble union, Christ himself, the author and finisher of the sacraments, has merited for us by his passion." The faithful are, therefore, to be taught, that, united in the bonds of mutual love, the husband and wife are enabled, by the grace of this sacrament, to repose in each other's affections; to reject every criminal attachment; to repel every inclination to unlawful intercourse; and