Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/105

 ," wrote Bishop Westcott in his remarkable essay on "The Two Empires: the Church and the World" "was destined by its very nature not to save but to destroy the Empire," and perhaps the truth of this observation is nowhere more clearly seen than in the handling of marriage. The influence of the Empire long restrained the full operation of Christian ideas, and before those ideas could find free expression the Empire had to be destroyed.

We may select for sufficient example the case of the marriage of slaves. Two questions were to be answered in connection with this subject. In the first place, might slaves marry at all? In the next place, might they marry any save slaves? The Roman law did not regard the slave as a person, but as a chattel; accordingly marriage was not in his case permissible. Human nature, however, is stronger than legal theory, and, in point of fact, unions, which may fairly be regarded as marriages, were contracted by slaves with the consent of their masters. Christianity accepted