Excerpt from A Treatise on Matrimony, According to the Doctrine and Discipline of the Catholic Church Matrimony, one of the institutions of God himself from the beginning of the world, for the preservation of the human race, created after his own image and likeness, was to bear the stamp of the divine goodness, which the Supreme Architect had impressed on all his works; "and God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good." (Gen. c. 15, v. 31); and being designed, as we learn from the great Apostle, to symbolize that admirable union which was to be effected in the fullness of time, by the infinite charity of God, of the divine and human nature in the Person of the Eternal Word, incarnate; and of the Eternal Word incarnate, Jesus Christ, with all the members of the human race, engrafted in Him by the grace of regeneration, namely the Church; it was necessary that it should have also the stamp of unity and perpetuity, grounded on charity and love, superior even to that which man owes to his progenitors: "For this cause, thus speaks the above cited Apostle (Eph. c. 5, vv. 31, 32), shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh: This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the Church." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.