A Treatise on Matrimony

MATRIMONY, one of the institutions of God himself from the beginning of the world, for the preservation of the human race, created after his own image and likeness, was to bear the stamp of the divine goodness, which the Supreme Architect had impressed on all his works; "and God sawall the things that he had made, and they were very good." (Gen. c. 15, v. 31); and being designed, as we learn from the great Apostle, to symbolize that admirable union which was to be effected in the fullness of time, by the infinite charity of God, of the divine and human nature in the Person of the Eternal Word, incarnate; and of the Eternal Word incarnate, Jesus Christ, with all the members of the human race, engrafted in Him by the grace of regeneration, namely the Church; it was necessary that it should have also the stamp of unity and perpetuity, grounded on charity and love, superior even to that which man owes to his progenitors: For this cause, thus speak: the above cited Apostle, shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they sllaU be two in one flesh: This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the Church." Hence Matrimony: from the very beginning of creation, was a sacred sign, although not a sacrament, t\ dignity which was reserved for the time of the Christian Dispensation; it was a sacred sign of the admirable union of Jesus Christ with His Church, and of the grace which was to be conferred by Christian marriage under the new dispensation.