CIVIL MARRIAGE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Civil marriage

... fervor. Afterwards, when Fetuao and he ate their lunch under a tree, he spread out the consul's gift on the ground beside him, and the words freedom, justice, and equal rights boomed sonorously in his ears. To Fetuao, in her simplicity, the bunting appeared a sort of sanction or certificate of their civil marriage; and when she returned home she explained that it was all settled, the faamasino having written their names in the book and given them the ...

— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... leave this accursed spot that the old palace of the Inquisition is now the Ministry of Justice, where a liberal statesman has just drawn up the bill of civil marriage; and that in the convent of the Trinitarians a Spanish Rationalist, the Minister of Fomento, is laboring to secularize education in the Peninsula. There is much coiling and hissing, but the fangs of the ser-pent are much less prompt ...

— Castilian Days • John Hay