This brought matters to a crisis. On the one hand, the State declared all marriages not under the civil law illegal, and their issue illegitimate, refusing to recognize rites performed by the priests. On the other, those who obey the law are excommunicated from the church, and their cohabitation forbidden by the highest ecclesiastical authority. Thus matrimony is practically forbidden, and those who choose to enter it have their choice between arrest and excommunication. A young member of Congress, a man of gifts and influence, who stands as one of the leaders of the Liberal party, and who voted and argued for civil marriage, is engaged to the daughter of a wealthy merchant with proud lineage and aristocratic connections. He is willing to accept the civil authority, which he helped to create, and she and her father are also willing, but her mother is a devout church woman and cannot regard marriage as sacred without the blessing of a priest. She favors the alliance, but insists that the Church shall be recognized. The bishop declines to permit the ceremony unless the young man shall go to the confessional and retract his political record, with a vow to hereafter remain steadfast to the church. This he refuses to do. The couple will go to Europe or the States and there have the ceremony performed.
This action of the Chilian republic in substituting a civil for a religious ceremony in marriage and declaring the latter to be illegal, is a most important step in civilization, of which freedom for woman is such an essential factor; and its results in that country must be left in woman's every relation of life, promoting self-respect, self-reliance and security in place of the degradation, self-distrust and fear to which its church has so long condemned her.
It is of indisputed historic record that both the Christian Church and the Christian State in different centuries and under a number of differing circumstances gave their influence in favor of polygamy. The Roman emperor, Valentinian I, in the fourth century, authorized christians to take two wives; in the eighth century the great Charlemagne holding power over both church and state, in his own person practiced polygamy, having six, or according to some authorities, nine wives. With the Reformation this system entered Protestantism. As the first synod in North America was called for the purpose of trying a woman for heresy, so the first synod of the reformation was assembled for the purpose of sustaining polygamy, thus farther debasing woman in the marital relation. The great German reformer, Luther, although perhaps himself free from the lasciviousness of the old priesthood was not strictly monogamic in principle. When applied to by Philip, Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, for permission to marry a second wife while his first wife, Margaret of Savoy, was still living, he called together a synod of six of the principal reformers--Melancthon and Bucer among them--who in joint consultation decided "that as the Bible nowhere condemns polygamy, and as it has been invariably practiced by the highest dignitaries of the church," such marriage was legitimate, and the required permission was given. Luther himself with both the Old and the New Testaments in hand, saying, "I confess for my part that if a man wishes to marry two or more wives, I cannot forbid him, nor is his conduct repugnant to the Holy Scriptures." Thus we have the degrading proof that the doctrine of polygamy was brought into reformation by its earliest promoters under assertion that it was not inconsistent with the Bible or the principles of the Gospel. The whole course of Luther during the reformation proved his disbelief in the equality of woman with man; when he left the Catholic church he took with him the old theory of her created subordination. It was his maxim that "No gown or garment worse becomes a woman than that she will be wise," thus giving the weight of his influence against woman's intellectual freedom and independent thought. Although he opposed monastic life, the home for woman under the reformation was governed by many of its rules.