As a status created by contract, marriage confers on the parties certain privileges and exacts certain duties under legal protection and sanction. From the earliest period of the recorded history of England it has always been accepted doctrine that marriage as an institution is the keystone of the commonwealth and the highest expression of morality. The men of the law in England were anciently persons in holy orders, and the judges were originally bishops, abbots, deans, canons and archdeacons. As late as 1857 the clergy in their ecclesiastical courts had exclusive jurisdiction of matrimonial causes. They administered the Canon Law of the Western Church affecting marriage and ruled that in marriages lawfully made, and according to the ordinance of matrimony, the bond thereof can by no means be dissolved during the lives of the parties. By the passage of the Divorce Act of 1857 the jurisdiction in matrimonial causes was transferred to a new civil tribunal, and absolute divorce was sanctioned, with permission of remarriage on proof of adultery on the part of the wife, or adultery and cruelty on the part of the husband. It is seriously contended by some eminent churchmen that in spite of this legislation the Church of England still has as its definite existing law the old rule which obtained before the Reformation, namely, that marriage is indissoluble; that a limited divorce from bed and board may be permitted, but that an absolute divorce which leaves either party free to remarry during the lifetime of the other is forbidden. This supposed conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical laws of the realm furnishes an academic topic and engenders bad feeling, but it has no real existence. The Church of England exists by Act of Parliament and manifestly has no power to nullify statutes enacted by the legislature which established it as the official religious organization of the Kingdom. The civil courts of England have never considered marriage as a sacrament or religious ordinance, but have held that the dogmas and precepts of Christianity do not affect the civil status of marriage, but simply add to it a religious character. In this respect the law of England is in exact harmony with the attitude of the primitive Christian Church.