Luther showed some knowledge of nature when he taught that, though it may be possible for human beings to repress their actions outside wedlock, they cannot repress their feelings and desires. On the other hand he knew nothing of that creation of culture, love, and therefore he failed to see that exactly the same sentence which he used to confute celibacy may also be employed to confute marriage, for the vow of fidelity no more entails real faithfulness than the vow of chastity is the cause of true purity. Real fidelity can only arise when love and marriage become equivalent terms. The substance of Luther’s controversy on marriage was not a higher conception of matrimony than that of the Catholic Church, it was merely the restoration of marriage to churchmen and monastic communities. We have to thank Luther for the Lutheran parsonage and with it for a great contribution to the poetry of country life, to popular culture, to the production of many great minds, and—indirectly—to the moulding of many passionate free-thinkers. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage, on the other hand, deserves no thanks, since—like Protestantism as a whole—it stopped short in an insoluble contradiction. Instead of upholding, in the spirit of the Catholic Church and of Christ, the indissolubility of marriage and demanding the suppression of sensuality when the peace of the soul required it, Luther, by his insistence on the strength of natural inclinations, was forced into concessions, which—quite in accordance with the teachings of the Bible—went so far as to approve of bigamy. To the gross apprehension of the Reformation period the choice of a personal love meant nothing. With marriage possible from a natural point of view alone, it might be contracted with any one; indeed, to the genuinely pious it seemed a higher thing to enter into matrimony without any earthly love, which interfered with the love of God. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage made God “indulgent” towards all the impurity that the sexual life shut up within the whited sepulchre of lawful wedlock. He has shut his eyes to all the wife-murders that the command of fecundity involved; to all the worthless children produced by ill-matched and impure marriages. He has “blessed” all unions entered into, even though from the lowest motives, under the most unnatural circumstances: between a sick person and a healthy one, an old and a young, a willing and an unwilling or two unwilling ones, coupled together by their families. To-day, countless women are still being sacrificed to this doctrine of marriage, or to its unconscious effects; their exhausted wombs are a poor soil for the new generation; their crushed souls a broken support for the growth of new wills. For one woman who defends herself with the resolution lent by horror, there are thousands who have conceived and still conceive children in loathing. For one wife who is met with the modest prayer