But Christian theologians, in commenting on the Gospels, cannot give up that great principle of theirs, that the Gospel teaching is always based on a higher morality than that of Judaism. And in this case, too, they have found a way—rather far-fetched, it is true—of establishing the truth of their principle. In forbidding divorce, they say, Jesus only meant to protest against the injustice of Judaism to the wife, who could be divorced but could not divorce. He therefore took the right of divorce away from the husband, so that he should have no advantage over the wife. Here, then, is moral “progress,” a battle on woman’s behalf against the oriental barbarism of the Jews, and so forth. We might perhaps point out that there was a more sensible way of bestowing equality on the wife, if that was Jesus’ object—to wit, by giving the wife also the right of divorce. And we might ask, further, how it is that Matthew, who allows the husband to divorce his wife for _her_ unfaithfulness, never hints at any right on the part of the wife to demand a divorce from the husband on the ground of _his_ unfaithfulness.[177] Where, in fact, is the vaunted assertion of the wife’s rights? The commentators vouchsafe no answer to these plain and simple questions. But, indeed, there is no need of much questioning. It must be perfectly clear to all who read these passages in the Gospels without pre-conceived ideas that Jesus, in prohibiting divorce, had not the remotest notion of fighting the wife’s battle. The plea is from beginning to end a theological invention, designed to bolster up the theory.