feeling that it has no foundation in Christian teaching; and as they have not yet discovered Christ's ideal -the aspiration towards complete chastity -they remain in relation to marriage quite without guidance. Hence has resulted the seemingly strange circumstance, that among Jews, Mohametans, Lama-ists, and others, professing religious reaching of a much lower standard than the Christian, but having strict external definitions of marriage, the family principle and conjugal fidelity are incomparably firmer than with so-called Christians. The former have a regular system of concubinage, polygamy, or polyandry, confined within certain limits. Among us wholesale dissoluteness, concubinage, polygamy and polyandry exist, subject to no limits, and concealed under the appearance of monogamy.
It is only because the clergy, for money, perform a certain rite called ecclesiastical marriage, over a certain number of those joined together, that men to-day naively or hypocritically imagine they are living under monogamy.
There cannot be, and never has been, Christian marriage, any more than Christian worship (Matthew vi. 5-12; John iv. 21), nor Christian teachers and fathers of the Church (Matthew xxiii. 8-10), nor Christian property, nor a Christian army, nor law-courts, nor government.
And so it was always understood by the Christians of the first and succeeding centuries.
The Christian's ideal is love to God and to one's neighbor; it is the renunciation of self for the service of God and one's neighbor. Whereas sexual love, marriage, is service of self, and therefore in any case, an obstacle to the service of God and man; consequently, from a Christian point of view, a fall, a sin.
