The reader who is not yet familiar with Bonald's mode of thought is likely to be taken aback by this last idea; but Bonald is so perfectly serious in his identification of the father with power, the mother with the minister, and the child with the subject, that he actually, as a rule, employs the designations father, mother, and child in place of the others; because, he says, they apply to animals as well as to man, whereas power, minister, and subject apply exclusively to thinking beings. Besides, he elsewhere says, we must do our utmost to spiritualise man and his relations in view of the attempts that are made to degrade them. He introduces his theory with his customary formulæ. Man and woman, he says, both exist; but their manner of existence is not the same. They are like each other, but not equals. The union of the sexes is the object of the difference between them. The production of a human being is the object of their union. The father is strong, the child weak; the father active, the child inactive. The mother forms the connecting link. How so? The father, says Bonald, is a conscious being, and cannot become a father except with his own will; the mother, on the contrary, may, even with full consciousness, become a mother _against her will_ (hence inactively). The child neither wills to be born nor is conscious of being born. It is, thus, upon that revolting and tragic arrangement of nature which permits a woman to become a mother against her will that Bonald bases the difference in rank of the sexes. He says, moreover (_Du Divorce_, fifth edition, p. 71): "In this gradation of their relationship is to be found the solution of the question of divorce," namely, that it ought not to be allowed. If Bonald's mad theory, like many another equally mad, had simply remained a theory, which no one dreamt of putting into practice, there would be nothing to resent. But it was upon the principles proclaimed in his work that the laws of marriage and divorce which held good in France for the next seventy years were based![1] Immediately after the restoration of the Bourbons (twelve years after the publication of _Du Divorce_) Bonald's influence was so irresistible that the lethargic, religiously disposed National Assembly abolished divorce by an overwhelming majority--236 to 11 votes. It may be said, proceeds Bonald, writing of education, that the father is the power which, through the mother as minister or means, performs the reproductive and maintaining acts, which have the child as object or "subject." The relation of man and woman in marriage is simply this: Man is power (_le pouvoir_), woman is duty (_le devoir_). Does not Holy Scripture itself call man woman's head (or reason), woman man's helpmeet (or minister), and signify that the child is the subject by perpetually inculcating obedience as its duty?