fashion. The substitute in the Middle Ages was to discover that the marriage was invalid, as having been contracted within the prohibited degrees of affinity, and without a proper dispensation.[1] The Roman custom which forbade the union of all direct ascendants or descendants, whether by blood, adoption, or marriage,[2] did not allow of these demoralising evasions, and must be regarded as the outcome of higher sanitary science and stricter ethical practice.
On the whole, it is probably correct to say that every healthy society has endeavoured, in its best times at least, to treat marriage as indissoluble, and that when breaches of this practice have occurred, it has been through the irregular passions of powerful and wealthy men seeking to mould the law to their own wishes, or through the growth of a Bohemian and vagabond class. Christianity came into the world at a time when the old religious marriage was beginning to be found burdensome, and adopted the view which the most religiously-minded men of the time would instinctively take. The scandals of the Ecclesiastical Courts are only proof that the Church put itself into a thoroughly false position when it claimed the perilous office of determining under what circumstances the marriage-tie might be dissolved. It is noticeable that in England the change to secular society effected at the Reformation was attended with an infinitely greater rigour in matters affecting marriage. The early Reformers would no doubt have legalised divorce under conditions of absolute equality for both sexes;[3] but under Elizabeth a
