Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/95

 polygamy and divorce are in discredit; and the manners correct the laws. In Rome, whilst Rome was in its integrity, the few causes allowed for divorce amounted in effect to a prohibition. They were only three. The arbitrary was totally excluded; and accordingly some hundreds of years passed without a single example of that kind. When manners were corrupted the laws were relaxed; as the latter always follow the former when they are not able to regulate them or to vanquish them. Of this circumstance the legislators of vice and crime were pleased to take notice, as an inducement to adopt their regulation: holding out a hope that the permission would rarely be made use of. They knew the contrary to be true; and they had taken good care that the laws should be well seconded by the manners. Their law of divorce, like all their laws, had not for its object the relief of domestic uneasiness, but the total corruption of all morals, the total disconnection of social life."

The student of Christian history must be prepared for grave disappointment when he turns from such glowing eulogies of Christianity to seek their justifications in fact. It was only by very slow degrees, and with long intervals of desolating error, that the Christian Church arrived at such a theory and practice with respect to marriage as permits the