DOCTRINE TOUCHING THE SACRAMENT OF MATRIMONY

The first parent of the human race, under the instinct of the divine Spirit, pronounced the bond of matrimony perpetual and indissoluble, when he said; This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Wherefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh.

But, that by this bond two only are coupled and joined together, Christ our Lord taught more openly, when repeating those last words as having been uttered by God, He said, therefore they are no more twain, but one flesh; and straightway confirmed the firmness of that tie, proclaimed so long before by Adam, in these words; What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.

But, the grace which might perfect that natural love, and confirm that indissoluble union, and sanctify the wedded, Christ Himself, the institutor and perfecter of the venerable sacraments, merited for us by His passion; which Paul the Apostle intimates, saying: Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and delivered up himself for it; adding shortly after, This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the Church.

Whereas therefore matrimony, in the evangelical law excels the ancient marriages in grace, through Christ; with reason have our holy Fathers, the Councils, and the tradition of the universal Church, always taught, that it is to be numbered amongst the sacraments of the new law; against which impious men of this age raving, have not only entertained false opinions touching this venerable sacrament, but, introducing according to their wont, under the pretext of the Gospel, a liberty of the flesh, they have by writing and word asserted, not without great injury to the faithful of Christ, many things alien from sentiment of the Catholic Church, and from the usage approved of since the times of the apostles; whose rashness the holy and universal synod wishing to meet, has thought proper, lest their pernicious contagion should draw more after it, that the more conspicuous heresies and errors of the schismatics aforesaid be exterminated, decreeing against the said heretics and their errors the following anathemas.