"And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." At the threshold of life she is sold into slavery. She is not given to Adam--to share with him the dignity of humanity, the duties and rights of life,--but to be his creature. Suppose Jehovah had said: "A woman is as much a human being as a man, and because of her physical weakness, I shall charge myself to be her special protector and friend until man shall have advanced sufficiently in culture and civilization to do full justice to her." Ah, if Jehovah had only said _that_! In the Episcopal and Catholic marriage services, to this day, the wife is asked to promise to obey her husband. And this is the religion that pretends to be just and impartial to women. From the silence of Jesus on this subject, in a country and at a time when woman's condition was deplorable, and where the curse with which she had been cursed had really taken effect,--as well as from the few words he said about marriage,--Jesus shows his utter incapacity to tear himself from his Asiatic environment, or to rise to the nobler ideals of an advancing civilization. Again, in the light of his belief in a world soon to disappear, it becomes clear why Jesus ignored such subjects, for instance, as education, art and politics. There is not a word in all the sayings and sermons of Jesus about schools, or the acquisition of knowledge of nature and its laws. He does not devote a single thought to the education of children. Not once does he denounce ignorance, which is the mother of all abominations. In the age in which he lived, ignorance was the most abundant as well as the worst crop his own country raised. And yet, Jesus had absolutely nothing to say against it. It would take time to conquer knowledge, and the time was too short. Moreover, in the world to come, such knowledge would be superfluous. What wisdom the believers needed would be given to them miraculously, even as God rained down manna in the desert to the children of Israel. This idea that everything, even our daily bread, is _given_ to us, not acquired by us, explains also why Jesus ignored the subject of labor--the great transformer that transforms the world's waste places into gardens and its swamps into flourishing cities. "Consider the lilies of the fields," argues Jesus, with a suggestion of poetry in his usually severe and solemn speech,--"they toil not, neither do they spin,"--from which it is to be inferred that, if the lilies can be so fair and flourishing without toil or labor, so can man, if he will only put his trust in God.