This page needs to be proofread.
societies, before a rigid legislation, generally theocratic, had crystallised, in codifying them, some of the old barbarous customs. The Catholic prejudice itself, absurd as it was in regard to marriage, became humanised by time. Doubtless the Church continued in principle to condemn divorce, but she allowed a good number of cases of nullity of marriage, undoing thus with one hand what she attempted to build up with the other, and, willingly or not, compounding and compromising with "the world."
