case was a wonderful one, for both Jesus and Mary were there.  It was therefore the ideal of all weddings which seem to lack the true note of the new matrimony which springs from the Incarnation if they take place without such guests.  As in imagination we follow Mary as she goes quietly about the house, which like her own was a home of the poor, helping in the arrangements of the wedding, one cannot help recalling many weddings with which one has had something to do, and in the arrangements of which we cannot think of Mary as having any part.  They were the arrangements of the weddings of Christians, and the weddings took place in a Christian church; but neither is Mary there nor Jesus called.  We are unable to think of Mary as present amid the tumult of worldiness and frivolity, the endless chatter over dress and decoration, which so commonly precedes the celebration of a sacrament which is the symbol of “the mystical union that there is betwixt Christ and His Church.”  That deep piety which puts God and God’s will before all else would strike a jarring note here, where the dominant note is still the pagan note of the decking of the slave for her new master.  It is perhaps not without significance of the direction of the movement of the modern mind that the protests of the emancipated woman are against the Christian, not the pagan elements in matrimony:  she tends to regard marriage as a state of temporary luxury rather than the perfect union of two souls in Christ.  Clearly in marriages which are regarded as purely temporary engagements, dependent on the will of the parties for their continuance, there is no place for the mother of Jesus.  The purity that emanates from her will be a silent but keenly felt criticism on the whole conception underlying a vast number of modern marriages.  Even as I write I read that in a certain great city in the United States the number of divorces granted was one fourth of the number of the marriages celebrated.

Clearly at marriages which are surrounded with this atmosphere of paganism, be they celebrated where they may, there is no place for the Blessed Mother; and neither is Jesus called.  His priest, unfortunately, is often called, and dares celebrate a sacrament which in the circumstances he can hardly help feeling is a sacrilege.  There are many cases in which what purports to be Christian marriage is between those who are not Christians, or of whom only one is a Christian in any complete sense.  One hears frequently of the sacrament of matrimony being celebrated when only one of the parties is baptised.  It is of course possible for any priest to act on the authority conferred upon him by the state and in his capacity as a state official perform marriages between those whom the state authorises to be married:  but why do it under the character of a priest? or why throw about the ceremony the suggestions of a sacrament?