[Footnote 358: An important epoch in the history of social progress is reached when our New England ancestors recognized the support of popular education as a proper function of local government. The event is all the more remarkable because it led the development of thought in the mother-country by more than two centuries and a half. However, the primary motive of the Massachusetts act of 1647 for the establishment of elementary and grammar schools was to provide religious knowledge. "It being one cheife p'iect of y^t ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y^e Scriptures, as in form^r times by keeping y^m in an unknowne tongue, so in these latt^r times by p'swading from y^e use of tongues, y^t so at least y^e true sence & meaning of y^e originall might be clouded by false glosses of saint seeming deceivers, y^t learning may not be buried in y^e grave of o^r fath^{rs} in y^e church & co[=m]onwealth," etc.--_Mass. Col. Rec._, II, 203. _Cf._ also HOWARD, _Local Const. Hist._, I, 66-70; and _idem_, "The State University in America," _Atlantic Monthly_, LXVII (1891), 332 ff.] In no respect was the change more remarkable than in the administration of matrimonial law and in the conception of the marriage contract. Here, as in so many other instances, our ancestors anticipated the thought and the legislation of the mother-country by more than two hundred years.[359] It will be remembered that in the beginning of the seventeenth century--and ever since the thirteenth--English marriage law was in an anomalous and most chaotic state. The Reformation in England had brought no real change in the canonical conception of the form of wedlock, though its sacramental nature was denied. On the one hand was the church at the demand of the state trying to enforce ecclesiastical rites and to secure publicity by requirement of banns, parental consent, and registration; on the other was the "irregular" or common-law marriage, entered into without any of these safeguards, by mere private agreement; and the validity of the latter was not squarely impeached by the church, though the disregard of the priestly office was punished by spiritual censure. All this is changed in the colonies. In place of confusion and complexity is found simplicity. In New England particularly civil rites, civil registration, and uniform theory of marriage tend at once to prevent the manifold evils growing out of a lax or uncertain law. The conception of wedlock which existed there from the beginning was identical with that which later found expression in the writings of Milton and the legislation of Cromwell. Marriage was declared to be, not a sacrament, but a civil contract in which the intervention of a priest was unnecessary and out of place.