But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his doctrine
of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of indissoluble
marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this inhuman doctrine and
flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming, and rightly claiming,
that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but that is exactly what makes
divorce a duty when the marriage has lost the inward and spiritual grace
of which the marriage ceremony is the outward and visible sign. In vain
do bishops stoop to pick up the discarded arguments of the atheists of
fifty years ago by pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure
Aramaic dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think,
could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless they
are prepared to add that the statement that those who take the sacrament
with their lips but not with their hearts eat and drink their own
damnation is also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, they are most
solemnly bound to shield marriage from profanation, not merely by
permitting divorce, but by making it compulsory in certain cases as the
Chinese do.
When the great protest of the XVI century came, and the Church was
reformed in several countries, the Reformation was so largely
a rebellion against sacerdotalism that marriage was very nearly
excommunicated again: our modern civil marriage, round which so many
fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged, would have been
thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. But
the instinctive doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in
sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate from any priestly
ceremony, but which in those days seemed to all who felt it to need a
ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale
of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where
it was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex
abhorrence, and later Christian sex sanctification.