The moment we meet
with this difference in value between human beings, we may know
that we are in the slave-market, where the conception of our
relations to the persons sold is neither religious nor natural nor
human nor superhuman, but simply commercial. The Church, when
it finally gave its blessing to marriage, did not, in its
innocence, fathom these commercial traditions. Consequently it
tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The slave-
dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church,
instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the
temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and,
helped by its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave
virginity a heavenly value to ennoble its commercial pretensions.
In short, Mammon, always mighty, put the Church in his pocket,
where he keeps it to this day, in spite of the occasional saints
and martyrs who contrive from time to time to get their heads and
souls free to testify against him.
DIVORCE A SACRAMENTAL DUTY
But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his
doctrine of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of
indissoluble marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this
inhuman doctrine and flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming,
and rightly claiming, that marriage is a sacrament.
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