The race springs not from a unit, but from a united pair. The history of mankind began in wedlock. The family is the first institution of society, and the mother of all the rest. It is the life-basis, the primitive cell of the aggregate of cities and bodies politic. In the health and purity of household life lies the moral wealth, the vigour and durability of all civil institutions. The mighty upgrowth of nations and the great achievements of history germinated in the nursery of home and at the mother’s breast. Christian marriage is not an expedient--the last of many that have been tried--for the satisfaction of desire and the continuance of the human species. The Institutor of human life laid down its principle in the first frame of things. Its establishment was a great prophetic mystery (ver. 32). Its law stands registered in the eternal statutes. And the Almighty Father watches over its observance with an awful jealousy. Is it not written: “Fornicators and adulterers God will judge”; and again, “The Lord is an avenger concerning all these things”? St Paul rightly gives to this subject a conspicuous place in this epistle of Christ and the Church. The corner-stone of the new social order which the gospel was to establish in the world lies here. The entire influence of the Church upon society depends upon right views on the relationship of man and woman and on the ethics of marriage. In wedlock there are blended most completely the two principles of association amongst moral beings,--viz., authority and love, submission and self-surrender. I. On the one side, _submission to authority_.