Some earnest promoters of women’s rights have fallen into the error that Christianity, to which they owe all that is best in their present status, is the obstacle in the way of their further progress. It is an obstacle to claims that are against nature and against the law of God,--claims only tolerable so long as they are exceptional. But the barriers imposed by Christianity, against which these people fret, are their main protection. “The moment Christianity disappears, the law of strength revives; and under that law women can have no hope except that their slavery may be mild and pleasant.” To escape from the “bondage of Christian law” means to go back to the bondage of paganism. “As unto the Lord” gives the pattern and the principle of the Christian wife’s submission. Not that, as Meyer seems to put it, the husband in virtue of marriage “represents Christ to the wife.” Her relation to the Lord is as full, direct, and personal as his. Indeed, the clause inserted at the end of verse 23 seems expressly designed to guard against this exaggeration. The qualification that Christ is “Himself Saviour of the body,” thrown in between the two sentences comparing the marital headship to that which Christ holds towards the Church, has the effect of limiting the former.[140] The subjection of the Christian wife to her husband reserves for Christ the first place in the heart and the undiminished rights of Saviourship. St Paul indicates a real, and not unfrequent danger. The husband may eclipse Christ in the wife’s soul, and be counted as her all in all. Her absorption in him may be too complete. Hence the brief guarding clause: “He Himself [and no other] Saviour of the body [to which all believers alike belong].” As the Saviour of the Church, Christ holds an unrivalled and unqualified lordship over every member of the same. “Nevertheless, as the Church is subject to the Christ, so also wives [should be] to their husbands in everything” (ver. 24). Again, in verse 33: “Let the wife see that she fear her husband”--with the reverent and confiding fear which love makes sweet. As the Christian wife obeys the Lord Christ in the spiritual sphere, in the sphere of marriage she is subject to her husband. The ties that bind her to Christ, bind her more closely to the duties of home. These duties illustrate for her the submissive love that Christ’s people, and herself as one of them, owe to their Divine Head. Her service in the Church, in turn, will send her home with a quickened sense of the sacredness of her domestic calling. It will lighten the yoke of obedience; it will check the discontent that masculine exactions provoke; and will teach her to win by patience and gentleness the power within the house that is her queenly crown.