Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/130

 reckoned a grand and potent thing, full of energy, promise and happiness.

Now, throughout the Middle Ages, marriage was regarded by the best Christians of both sexes as implying something short of the rightful method of living. If one were indeed what the Gospel called men to become, then one would enter "religion," that is, become a monk or nun. Archbishop Trench has rightly offered this use of the word "religion" as an example of words preserving a record of a perversion of the moral sense. He says:

"We have a signal example of this, in the use, or rather misuse, of the word 'religion', during all the ages of Papal domination in Europe. A 'religious' person did not mean any one who felt and allowed the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellow-men, but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, a member of the monkish orders; a 'religious' house did not mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man. A 'religion' meant not a service of God, but a monastic order; and taking the monastic vows was termed going into a 'religion'. What a light does this one word so used throw on the entire state of mind and habits of thought in those ages!