Originally delivered as one of the St. Margaret's Lectures for 1904, the contents of this booklet are focused on aspects of the Syriac-speaking Church. Extracted from Burkitt's book Early Eastern Christianity, the fourth lecture concerns the development of marriage and the role of sacraments in the early Syriac Church. Burkitt finds that marriage was not early regarded as a sacrament and the married faithful were not permitted the sacraments of baptism or communion in the early tradition represented by Aphraates.