Neither Jesus nor Paul proclaimed the dignity of marriage, or discerned the necessity of enlarging the sphere of woman. Jesus shared the common sentiments of his age, and looked upon the marriage relation as incompatible with the establishment of the kingdom of heaven. He deemed it necessary to call his disciples away from their families, and even to advise the men to make eunuchs of themselves if they were able to do so. (Mat. 19 : 12.) In his teachings on the question of divorce, he is far from perceiving the even-handed justice which the case demands. He says (Mark 10 : 11, 12) that if either the husband or the wife put away one the other and marry again, commits adultery. All second marriages would therefore be unlawful according to this teaching. In Matthew (5 : 32) he permits the husband to put away the wife for the crime of fornication, but makes no provision for the wife to put away the husband for the same offense. His disciples received an unfavorable impression of marriage, and after listening to him on this subject, they suggested: "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry." (Mat. 19 : 10.) How could these plain people have misunderstood him upon a subject with so little chance for misapprehension? Paul's teachings were adverse to the marital relations: "Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife." (1 Cor. 7 : 27.) "It is better to marry than to burn." (1 Cor. 7 : 9.) What an idea of marriage! He does not have the least conception of love, or of the higher and refining joys of the conjugal relation. But permits him who cannot keep himself from beastliness to marry. In this his judgment is remarkably short-sighted, for he does not regard the sacrifice which the woman must make who marries the beast. He looks upon woman as a mere safety-valve for men's passions,--her rights are not considered: she has no rights. He will permit man to marry, but young widows he denounces as heaping up damnation to themselves in marrying: "But the younger widows refuse, for when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ, they will marry having damnation, because they cast off their first faith." (1 Tim. 5 : 11, 12.) To marry was to wax wanton against Christ, which was nothing less than damnation! But old widows who were above sixty years of age could join the church if they had "been the wife of one man" and "had washed the saints' feet." (1 Tim. 5 : 9, 10.) I wonder what he thought of rejecting all young widowers, and accepting none under sixty years of age, and only those of them who had washed their grandmother's feet?