The acceptance of Luther's teaching that marriage is not a sacrament, but a "worldly thing," led at once to the rejection of the jurisdiction of the existing ecclesiastical courts. A dual problem thus arose for solution: Is marriage dissolved _ipso facto_ through the commission of the offenses recognized as grounds of divorce; or, if any intervention of public authority is requisite, what is that authority, and what is its exact function? The researches of Stölzel have clearly established that in the beginning the reformers returned to the principle of self-divorce prevailing among the ancient Romans and Hebrews, and accepted by some of the early church councils. According to the modern conception, he declares, a marriage may normally be dissolved during the lifetime of the parties by the sentence of a judge in a legally constituted court after due process of law. Only in exceptional cases is a resort to a political magistrate allowed. The judicial decree is the medium of the dissolution; and it implies, without express permission, the right of each of the divorced persons to remarry, unless the statute has otherwise provided. The divorce law of the Reformation starts from a different, almost an opposite, conception. When an adequate cause exists, a marriage is thereby dissolved in favor of the innocent person without any magisterial authority whatsoever. If in certain cases, in order to establish the existence of the grounds of dissolution, any action is needful, it is regarded as extra-judicial; and when gradually such informal proceedings have grown into an orderly process dealing directly with the question of divorce, this process concludes with a decree; not that the marriage _is_ thereby dissolved, but that it _has_ already been dissolved in consequence of the grounds now established. Nor did the divorce of itself involve the right of remarriage. That privilege was always in practice, if not in theory, denied to the guilty spouse; and after a regular process arose it was usual, even as late as the eighteenth century, to grant it to the innocent person only by special magisterial permission or "toleramus."[208] From the beginning in some German lands the only purpose of the judicial action was to determine the fact that the marriage was already dissolved in order to justify this license.[209] Luther and other Protestant leaders accepted the theory just explained that a marriage is "broken" or dissolved when a proper cause intervenes; and if without exception[210] they insisted that the married persons should not separate themselves, but appeal to public authority, they had in mind, as Luther plainly shows, the establishment of the fact of wedlock already broken in order, where it was desired, to grant the permission of marrying again.[211] [Footnote 208: STÖLZEL, _Ueber das landesherrl. Ehescheidungsrecht_, 9-19; or the same in _ZKR._, XVIII, 1-4; DIETRICH, _Evang. Ehescheidungsrecht_, 39.]