In finishing this notice I must remark that there is one social institution about which our Lord does not shun to speak; this is marriage. He upholds the sanctity and inviolability of the marriage tie more stringently than did the Jewish Law. The scribe who came “making trial” of our Lord is confounded—not by being put off without an answer—as usually happens in these cases, but by the singular positiveness of the reply. “And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth her when she is put away committeth adultery.”(306) This exception is not inconsistent with the principles governing our Lord’s acts. Christ’s teaching was meant for all mankind, and Christianity would have been less adapted for universal use if it had been bound up with particular institutions. But marriage is not a particular institution, it is declared to be as universal as the human race; it goes down deeper than all divisions, it belongs to the stock below the point where the branches sprout. Thus Christ’s recognition of the sanctity of marriage does not hamper human legislation, or prevent the growth of Humanity in any manner consistent with its health. Close by the side of this matter lies another on which I must only say a word. It is one of the Gesta Christi that He has put woman into her right place. Slowly and quietly has this come about, as a growth from seed turned up in the soil, and not a construction upreared by men,—as indeed, with the changes that are wrought by Christ is mostly the way. He says not a word about the social condition of women or their position in the eye of the Law; He puts forward no grievances, He asserts no claim. To have done either one or the other in His day would have been to bring about a violent upheaval, which would have destroyed all chance of the germination of the seed. Nowhere do men cling to old usages with more tenacity than in the matter of relations between sex and sex. These variations of usage may rest upon solid grounds, and it would have stood in the way of the adaptability of what He left to the needs of all races and all times, if by one rigid ordinance He had enforced uniformity, even in the justest way. But though our Lord says little about the right place of women yet He treats them as though that proper place were already theirs; for parts are given them in His great world-drama consistent with those they take in the common life of family and home.(307) One word that our Lord drops has too important a bearing on this point to be passed by. Frequently as our Lord alludes to eternal life, it is rarely that anything as to the modes of this life can be gathered from His speech, but in the one passage in which He does touch on this directly, He implies that distinction of sex ceases with the life upon earth.