the only aspect under which the relations of man and woman are represented to us?  That every thing is not said in one passage is true enough.  From the desultory manner in which the ethics as well as doctrines of the New Testament are expounded to us, and especially from the casual form which they assume in the Apostolic Epistles, where the particular circumstances of the parties addressed naturally suggested the degree of prominence given to each topic, we must fairly examine the whole volume in order to comprehend the spirit of the whole, and not take up a solitary passage as though it were the only one.  Now, if we examine other passages, we cannot fail to see that the New Testament consecrates married life by enjoining the utmost purity, devotion, and tenderness of affection.  Look at only one or two of the passages in which the New Testament enjoins the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives; what sort of model it proposes for their love.  “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for it .....  Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.  So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies, .... giving honor unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life.”

Is this like condemning women to be “elegant toys and voluptuous appendages”?

Admitting, for the sake of argument, that the whole of Christianity is a delusion; that Christ never lived, and therefore never died; that he is a more palpable myth than even Dr. Strauss contends for; still it is impossible not to see that the writers of the New Testament represent his love for man as the ideal of pure, disinterested, self-sacrificing affection; this appears whether we listen to the words which the Evangelists have put into his mouth, or those in which they have spoken of him.  “Greater love hath non man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  Now, let there be as much or as little historic truth in such statements, in the doings and sufferings of Christ on behalf of humanity, as you will, the conclusion is irresistible that his conduct (real or imaginary) is set forth as the exhibition of unequalled patience, gentleness, meekness, and forbearance; of a love anxious to purchase, at the dearest cost, the purest and highest happiness of its objects.  Now such is the pattern of affection which the Apostles commend to the imitation of “husbands and wives” in their conduct towards one another.  Such is to be the lofty standard which their love is to emulate.  Is it possible to go further?  Does not the fantastical observance, or rather the absolute idolatry of women cherished by chivalry,—­itself, however, rooted in the influences of a corrupt Christianity,—­look like a caricature beside the picture?  And who are the “poets of Germanic culture” who have risen to an equal ideal of the reciprocal duties and sentiments of wedded life?  I must contend