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 the Empire, he says that "the dignity of marriage was restored by the Christians," and shows that "the Christian princes were the first who specified the just causes of a private divorce." Burke found the worst and guiltiest feature in the French Revolution in its repudiation of the Christian conception of marriage. His fierce language was, perhaps, in this respect hardly excessive:

"Other legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavoured by every art to make it sacred. The Christian religion, by confining it to the pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these two things done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and civilisation of the world than by any other part in this whole scheme of Divine wisdom. The direct contrary course has been taken in the synagogue of Antichrist, I mean in that forge and manufactory of all evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789. Those monsters employed the same or greater industry to desecrate and degrade that state which other legislators have used to render it holy and honourable. By a strange uncalled-for declaration they pronounced that marriage was no better than a common civil contract. .. .

"The practice of divorce, though in some countries permitted, has been discouraged in all. In the East,