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France broke with the old ecclesiastical tradition of the indissolubility of matrimony in 1885 by a divorce law in some respects very reasonable. The influence of France has doubtless been influential in moulding the divorce laws of the other Latin countries.
Kentigern, and, on proof of his identity, giving him authority to draw the sum of five thousand dollars damages awarded for the loss of certain property on the Skyscraper, at the request of James Gow. Yet it was with mixed sensations that the consul sought the little shop of the optician with this convincing proof of Gow's faithfulness and the indissolubility of Ailsa's engagement.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion, the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his property.
If Christian Europe is not covered with harems, if polygamy has never gained a foothold in Europe, if, with the indissolubility and sanctity of matrimony, the palladium of European civilization has been saved from destruction, it is all owing to the Popes.
His conclusion was that the notion of the indissolubility of marriage, or even the modified law of England and of other countries, authorizing divorce only for certain gross reasons, were mere relics of superstitious tradition, the concoction of the Canonists and Sacramentalists in the ages of sacerdotal tyranny, unworthy of more enlarged views of justice and liberty, and a canker and cause of incalculable misery in the heart of modern society.
For this reason, too, the ring is worn on the fourth finger, because there is a certain vein in that finger which they say reaches to the heart." Clandestine marriages were forbidden, but the Church always presumed everything it could in favour of marriage and its indissolubility.
They were: first, that slavery had been forever abolished; second, that the indissolubility of the Federal Union had been permanently established and universally recognized; third, that the absolute and independent sovereignty of the several States was a thing of the past; fourth, that a national sovereignty had been at last created and established, resulting in sufficient power being vested in the general government not only to guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of government, but to protect, when necessary, the individual citizen of the United States in the exercise and enjoyment of the rights and privileges to which he is entitled under the Constitution and laws of his country.
You may insist now that my argument against your present conviction of the indissolubility of marriage is mere individualism, but I want you to think of what I have told you, not to answer me now. I know your argument by heart, that Christian character develops by submission, by suffering, that it is the woman's place to submit, to efface herself. But the root of the matter goes deeper than that.
It was but the Johnson theory which we presented to the world, denying the right of any State to secede; asserting the perpetuity, the indissolubility of the Union. But the question was, whether the members from the seceding States should be admitted to the Senate and House; and he dealt with this most difficult problem in a statesmanlike way.
That is, however, a mistake. Even the Canonists themselves were never able to put forward any coherent and consistent ground for the indissolubility of matrimony which could commend itself rationally, while Luther and Milton and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who maintained the religious and sacred nature of sexual union though they were cautious about using the term sacrament on account of its ecclesiastical implications so far from believing that its sanctity involved indissolubility, argued in the reverse sense.
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