at the way he came, but ever forward along the way yet to be trodden and not yet mastered.
In this consists the difference between Christ's teaching and all other religious teachings, a difference not of claims, but of methods of guidance.
Jesus gave no definition of life. He established no institutions, neither marriage nor any other. But men, not understanding the peculiarities of his teaching, accustomed to external teaching, and desirous of feeling themselves justified -as the Pharisee felt himself justified -have from the letter of Christ's teaching, but in direct opposition to its whole spirit, constructed an external system of rules known as Church doctrine, and by this teaching they have displaced Christ's true doctrine of the ideal.
Church doctrines -self-styled Christian- have substituted external definitions and rules in relation to all the phenomena of life, in the place of Christ's teaching of the ideal, and contrary to the spirit of his teaching. This has been done with reference to governments, law, war, the Church, and worship. It has also been done in relation to marriage. In spite of the fact that Jesus not only never established marriage, but, so far as external ordinances go, rather discountenanced it ("Leave thy wife and follow me") -Church teachings, self-styled Christian, have established marriage as a Christian institution; that is, they have defined the external conditions under which sexual love, as they assert, may become perfectly sinless and quite lawful for a Christian.
As the institution of marriage has no basis whatever in the true Christian teaching, however, it has come to pass that men to-day have quitted one shore without reaching the other: they do not believe in the ecclesiastical definition of marriage as matter of fact,
