ism as adultery. We must note that Hermas, in sharp opposition to hyperæscetic tendencies, commends the continual and loving thinking of one's own wife as the best means of protection against such seducing thoughts. (This supports I Tim. iii: 2, my fifth view, p. 86.)

Can we think it possible that the loose relation of the sexes in heathenism which led a Christian writer to speak of it as fornication and adultery was exempted from renunciation on the part of Catechumens before baptism?

"A complete rupture with the sinful heathen pact was demanded of new members." It was not the heathen, but the Christian standard of sin that governed this renunciation, and it was embodied in the Catechumenal catechism to which Von Dobschuts refers.

"This is no imaginary picture. Every single fact, he assures us, has been supported by documentary evidence. The apologists were thoroughly entitled to represent morality in the Christian churches as Aristides has done. Heathen, like Pliny, Lucian and Celsus, were compelled, even against their wills, to witness to the correctness of the picture." (Von Dobshuts, Sexual Relations: pp. 349 and 43.)

"Thou shalt not commit adultery." This command ordinarily restricted to marriage, had already received a wider application in the later Jewish literature through the prohibition of fornication or sexual relations outside of the marriage bond. This is polygamy.

We are accustomed, or ought to be, to look upon adultery and fornication as equally sinful. The Grecian world of that time had quite another view. The respectable wife of a citizen was brought up in strict seclusion, shut up in her special apartment, almost like an oriental, and in her case adultery hardly ever occurred on the part of the true wife.

To the husband chiefly and almost exclusively belonged the disgraceful distinction of abusing this sacred relation, till in the then more recent days of degeneracy, wives rivalled their immoral husbands in evil practices and individual divorcements, so that certain women computed the passing times not by the succession of consuls, but of different husbands, to quote a current saying.

In checking up the whole matter of divorce, as we have seen, Christ placed woman on a perfect equality of conjugal rights with the man-not as a license for abuse, but as an effective curb and restraint.

Wherever there was a woman entitled to the name of a wife, a prestige still clustered about her even in the corrupt circles and abodes of the rich polygamists, and the unmarried concubine, the female factor of polygamy, was at an unenviable discount. But lust laughs at obstacles.

Now, the point to be noted is that the lawlessness of polygamy or concubinage, and the immorality thereof, must have shocked the simple-minded Christians in the devout early days of Christianity, so that its renunciation should give a clean profession of allegiance to the Holy One, naturally preceded baptism, as our author reports to be his finding. Under such circumstances the incorporation of polygamy in the apostolic church is an unthinkable or self-evident contradiction.

I will now submit some additional evidence in disproof of the opinion and assertion that polygamists had a place in the apostolic and primitive churches of Christ. Use will, in this case, be chiefly made of an inquiry as to the faith and morals of the early church by Rev. Joseph Bingham, M. A., Fellow

University College, Oxford, in nine volumes, published in London, 1843.

The precise bearing of some of these citations will be apparent when it is remembered that according to the great commission the test of baptism determined who were admitted as adults to church membership. Hence, Bingham remarks, touching this feature of his great work on the antiquities of the Christian church: "I have been the more particular in making inquiries concerning these several kinds of adult persons, who might, or might not, be admitted to baptism, because these are questions which the reader will not readily find so distinctly examined in modern writers, who have professedly treated of the subject of baptism." The burden of his inquiry relates to officialism.

Basil the Great, Bishop of Cæsarea, in the fourth century, observes "that the fathers said little or nothing of polygamy, as being a brutish vice, to which mankind had no very great propensity." He determines it to be a greater sin than fornication, and assigns it a longer course of penance. To speak of it as fornication, therefore, was mild. Is it at all likely that, if polygamy had received apostolic toleration in the early church, it would have so thoroughly died out by the time of Basil? About the same age a story was put afloat that the Emperor Valentinus married his second wife, Justina, while Severa, his first wife, was living, and with her approval; and that he even decreed a law in favor of polygamy. A book, entitled Polygamia Triumphatrix-Polygamy Triumphant—was reported to have been written in praise of this law. But no such law appears in either of the codes of Justinian, and a thorough search by such scholars as Baronius and Valesius concludes that the story was a groundless

fiction. Indeed, there is much in the codes quite the contrary, as, for example, the edict of Diocletian, where he says: "No Roman was allowed to have two wives at once, but was liable to be punished before a competent judge." It was by heathen law prohibited to the old Romans. Sallust says that the "Romans were used to ridicule polygamy in the barbarians. And though Julius Cæsar attempted to have a law passed in favor of it, he could not effect it." Plutarch remarks that Mark Antony was the first that had two wives among the Romans; and it is true that a few other conspicuous individuals set the law temporarily at defiance, such as Sylla, who had five wives; Pompey, five; Cæsar, four; and Hortensius divorced his wife to marry her to a friend, which transcended Spartan laxity. But "there never was any law to authorize polygamy in the Roman Empire" (notes 152).

Now, it may be fairly submitted, whether it is not violently improbable that the company of Christians who broke away from the heathen life and with a holy zeal consecrated themselves to a higher and holier life, would receive into their society lawless polygamists who were morally accounted as vile as or more vile than individual fornicators?

As having a like pertinence, there was enacted a rule by the first Council of Toledo, 400 A. D., "which accounts it the same thing as polygamy for a man to have a wife and a concubine together; for such an one may not communicate." Here is an explicit exclusion of polygamy from the church. Would such a deliverance have been possible, had they believed the apostolic church had in it polygamists?

But it is further provided, that if he be joined to one woman only, whether wife or concubine, as he pleases, he may not be repelled. In such a case, "she was not to be

accounted guilty of fornication, nor he of adultery, in the eye of the church, provided they kept together faithfully and entirely to each other by an exact performance of the mutual contract between them for life. This was the reason that the church allowed such a man to communicate who was united to a concubine in the aforesaid sense." That was what is now known as common law marriage and valid. The formality of a legal ceremony was lacking.

These were genuine Christian monogamous marriages, but "for lack of ceremony the civil law inflicted certain disabilities she (the informal wife) had no rights in her husband's estates, nor her children to inheritances." However humiliating, these disabilities did not affect moral character. With us these marriages would be legal and valid, without any disabilities, for the mere ceremony is not essential to the formation of the conjugal relation.* When a man and a woman agree to be husband and wife, and act and hold themselves forth to those around them as such, the law firmly holds them in the bonds of this institution. Marriage is not a mere contract, civil or religious, but an institution so that those who enter into it cannot dissolve their relation, but only the sovereign power of the state. Hence in divorce or separation, a court, as the organ of the sovereign State, has to intervene.

Now this sort of concubines so called, being in the nature

* In Brooklyn, N. Y., a gentleman met at the house of a friend he was visiting his friend's sister-in-law; showed her marked attentions, which were favorably received. Once, when riding out, he placed a ring on her finger, with assurance that that was sufficient token of their marriage. She went with him to New York City and lived with him as his wife. When she had two children, she saw in the papers the notice of the marriage of the man she had honored as her husband. The courts defended her honor. It is among the leading cases.