CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AN HISTORICAL AND DOCTRINAL STUDY - GEORGE
HAYWARD JOYCE -- 1933 -- INTRODUCTION -- THE civilization of
Christendom-the civilization of which we are the heirs-was founded
on Christian Marriage. The religion of Christ had lifted family
life onto a new plane. It taught that marriage is sacred, God being
the agent Who establishes and ratifies the union between husband
and wife that the bond thus divinely blessed is indissoluble until
death that the wife is no mere chattel, but a party to a contract
between equals and that all sexual relations outside marriage,
whether on the part of the husband or the wife, are grievously
sinful. These truths gave to the union a dignity, a purity, and a
sanctity hitherto undreamed of. Where they held sway in mens minds
the foundations of society were secure it could never suffer
complete ruin. For in the social organism the true units are not
isolated individuals, but families. And where the Christian ideal
of marriage prevails, the family, strengthened by supernatural
sanctions, will hold good through every crisis, and even in the
greatest political convulsions provides the principle of eventual
recovery. The early Middle Ages afford an instance in point. When
in the West the Roman Empire went down before the barbarians, and
civilization seemed threatened with complete and permanent
dissolution, it is not disputed that the rebuilding of the social
order was in chief measure the work of the Catholic Church. It was
the Church, which fused into one the alien races, which gave to a
broken world hope and courage for the future, which not merely
saved mens moral standards from total collapse, but ennobled and
purified them. The preservationof civilization did not, it is true,
enter directly and explicitly into the Churchs aims. Her primary
object was to spread the knowledge of God, and to lead men to keep
His law. When the Northern tribes accepted the faith of Christ, she
strove alike by exhortation and by a rigid ecclesiastical
discipline to make them conform their lives to the code of the
Gospel. But her efforts for that end were directed in large measure
to enforcing the law of Christian Marriage. The Penitentials and
the decrees of local councils afford abundant evidence of this and
many examples wiU occur in the pages of this book. Little by little
her teaching took effect. And though her aims were primarily
spiritual, they were also fruitful for good in the temporal sphere.
By giving to the world the Christian family, she provided the basis
of a new and better social order. She rebuilt society from its
foundations. Indeed she did more than rebuild she re-fashioned the
very material of its construction. The centuries during which the
renewal took place were an age of violence and lawlessness. The
gravest abuses abounded both in ecclesiastical and civil life. Yet
this does but render it the more wonderful that in the course of
this period the Church succeeded in substituting the lofty and
supernatural ideal of Christian Marriage for the debased standards
which prevailed in both sections of the population. Christianity
had, it is true, been the official religion of the Roman empire
since the days of Constantine...
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