But, however important the public duties that women will ultimately be called upon to perform, the Family is after all their highest and most distinctive sphere of work. It was in allusion to their domestic influence that I spoke of them as the originators of spiritual power. Now the Family, although it is the basis of all human society, has never been satisfactorily defended by any received system of society. All the corrosive power of metaphysical analysis has been employed upon it; and of many of the sophisms put forward no rational refutation has been given. On the other hand, the protection of the theologians is no less injurious. For they still persist in connecting the institutions of the Family with their obsolete dogmas, which, however useful they may have been formerly, are now simply dangerous. From the close of the Middle Ages the priesthood has been powerless, as the licentious songs of the troubadours prove, to protect the sanctity of marriage against the shallow but mischievous attacks which even then were made against it. And afterwards, when these false principles became more generally prevalent, and even royal courts disgraced themselves by giving public approval to them, the weakness of the priests became still more manifest. Thus nothing can be more monstrous than these ignorant assertions that theological doctrines have been the safeguard of the Family. They have done nothing to preserve it from the most subversive attacks, under which it must have succumbed, but for the better instincts of society, especially of the female portion of it. With the exception of a foolish fiction about the origin of Woman, theology has put forward no systematic defence of marriage; and as soon as theological authority itself fell into discredit, the feeble sanction which it gave to domestic morality became utterly powerless against sophistical attacks. But now that the Family can be shown on Positive principles to rest on scientific laws of human nature or of society, the danger of metaphysical controversy and theological feebleness is past. These principles will be discussed systematically in the second volume of the larger Treatise to which this work is the Introduction. But the few remarks to which I must at present limit myself, will, I hope, at least satisfy the reader as to the capability of Positivism to re-establish morality upon a firm basis. [Woman’s mission as a wife. Conjugal love an education for universal sympathy] According to the lower views of the subject, such as those coarsely expressed by the great hero of reaction, Napoleon, procreation and maternity are the only social functions of Woman. Indeed many theorists object even to her rearing her children, and think it preferable to leave them to the abstract benevolence of the State. But in the Positivist theory of marriage, the principal function of Woman is one quite unconnected with procreation. It is a function dependent on the highest attributes of our nature.