But, perhaps, we ought not to think it so very strange that men who dishonor God, and who want Him blotted out of their thoughts, should abuse God’s best gift to man. This much we know, that God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He _them_. And God blessed _them_, and God said unto them, “Have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” When the Pharisees, in their malignity, framed the question, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?”--a problem beset with many difficulties, our Lord very promptly asked a counter question, “What did Moses command you?” Instead of entering into their vexed question, He appeals at once to the law and the testimony, and requires them to recite the provision made by Moses for such cases; not as settling the difficulties, but as presenting the true _status quaestionis_, which was not what the Scribes taught or the Pharisees practiced, but what Moses meant and God permitted. They said, “Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away.” Quickly Jesus replied, “For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.” The substance of our Saviour’s answer was, Moses gave you no positive command in the case; he would not make a law directly opposite to the law of God; but Moses saw the wantonness and wickedness of your hearts, that you would turn away your wives without any just and warrantable cause; and to restrain your extravagancies of cruelty to your wives, or disorderly turning of them off upon any occasion, he made a law that none should put away his wife but upon a legal cognizance of the cause and giving her a bill of divorce. “From the beginning,” that is, in the very act of creation, God embodied the idea of equality. Capricious divorce is a violation of natural law.