“I tell you, easy divorce goes right along with merciful laws, public schools, clean prisons, free press, free speech.”
Mrs. Cheever was a very good woman, and she abominated divorces. She had very peculiar reasons for wanting one herself, as every one has who wants one, but she felt her case to be so exceptional that it proved the rule against divorces. She shrank a little from the iconoclastic lawyer she had come to for aid, and reminded him of the solemnity of the theme.
“Don't you believe in the sanctity of matrimony?”
“Just as much as I believe in the sanctity of personal liberty and a contract and a debt and the obligation to vote and bear arms and equality of opportunity and responsibility and—oh, a lot of other sacred things—just as much and no more.”
“But the Church calls marriage a sacrament.”
“It does now, yes; but it didn't for over fifteen hundred years.”
“What!”
“It's true. The trouble with you religious people is that you never know the history of your own religion. And remember one more thing: the marriage rules of the Christian Church are all founded on the theories of men who never married. No wonder they found it easy to lay down hard and fast rules. Remember another thing: the early Church fathers, Saint Paul, Hieronymus, and thousands of others, believed that marriage was only a little bit better than the worst evil, and that womankind was hardly more than the devil's natural weapon.
“It was not until the Church was eleven hundred and sixty-four years old that Peter Lombard put marriage among the seven sacraments. And marriage did not become an official matter of Church jurisdiction till the Council of Trent in fifteen hundred and sixty-three. Think of that! Marriage was not a sacrament for fifteen centuries, and it has been one for less than four. And at that the Church could only manage the problem by increasing the number of impediments to marriage, which meant that it increased the number of excuses for annulling it.
“The total number of marriages annulled would amaze you. History is full of the most picturesque devices for granting divorce without seeming to. Sometimes they would illegitimize two or three generations in order to find a marriage within the forbidden degrees.