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No questions are in themselves of greater importance, and none more difficult to answer wisely, than those which are connected with the institution of marriage. On the one hand, they affect the large, complicated and ramifying interests of property, for all rules of succession must be based on the principles which determine legitimacy. On the other hand they affect, and that in the most manifest and vital degree, the morals of the community, for the sexual relationship itself is regulated either for good or for evil by the Marriage Law.

Morality stands in the closest connection with religion, and the Church hardly less than the State is interested in the rules which determine the conditions under which the marriage union is created and cancelled. Social stability is not to be severed from domestic purity, and this depends on the