legal manner, as the laws of God and man require; and therefore
are yet, in the sense of both, no less than adulterers, and living in
adultery. To this, Sir," says he, "I know you will object, that there
was no clergyman or priest of any kind, or of any profession, to perform
the ceremony; nor any pen and ink, or paper, to write down a contract of
marriage, and have it signed between them. And I know also, Sir, what
the Spaniard governor has told you; I mean of the agreement that he
obliged them to make when they took these women, viz. that they should
choose them out by consent, and keep separately to them; which, by the
way, is nothing of a marriage, no agreement with the women as wives, but
only an agreement among themselves, to keep them from quarrelling.

"But, Sir, the essence of the sacrament of matrimony (so he called it,
being a Roman) consists not only in the mutual consent of the parties to
take one another as man and wife, but in the formal and legal
obligation that there is in the contract to compel the man and woman at
all times to own and acknowledge each other; obliging the man to