Footnote

b As reference works show, the Roman Catholic Church eventually claimed for itself the exclusive right to legislate regarding marriage, bringing forth its own regulations and restrictions and holding that civil authorities must be bound by these. The Protestant Reformers swung very much in the other direction and placed marriage almost entirely in the hands of the civil authorities. In England, Scotland and Ireland the civil ceremony was introduced in 1653 to free the Church from secular affairs. A French law of 1792 made the civil ceremony obligatory upon all citizens on the principle that “the citizen belongs to the state, irrespective of religion.” (The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, pp. 199, 200)