and Redeemer, coming in man's own likeness, living and dying, teaching and suffering for him, claimed him as his own, and disclosed to him his inheritance, woman recovered her rank too. When he had been discrowned, she had been enslaved; for the discrowning had been in some sense her special work, and she had been the mother, by her own fault, of a degraded race. But now that the time of forfeiture had run out, and the estate been recovered, and a Prince of unimaginable rank had been born in the disinherited line, and had raised it to his own degree, her servitude determined likewise; for the Prince was born of her alone, and her work in the recovery was as special as it had been in the descent. In virtue of that birth in the cave of Bethlehem, and of that Child who was Man Himself, but Son of woman alone, the Christian woman at once took a rank no longer merely relative and dependent, but absolute, and her own, as co-heiress with man in all Christian rights and promises. At the beginning of man's history there stood a woman surpassingly fair in body, fairer yet in mind, to whom it was given to bear in her single hands the destiny of man. Evil approached her from without, feebly and insidiously; for it had no hold on the inner sanctuary of her mind; she could have repelled it with one effort, in virtue of the magnificent grace with which she was dowered; but she listened to it, yielded to it, and persuaded man to yield also; and she carried his race and hers

with her in the fall. Thenceforth sorrow upon sorrow, in what seemed a never-ending flood, fell upon man's life; but how much more upon woman's, for the first seduction had been hers. At length, when the history of many thousand years had shown but a series of failures on man's part, when his last and most elaborate civilisation had made his life the most valueless in his own eyes, and the slave and the gladiator had become the measure of the rank which he assigned to his own nature, there stood in the most secret path of the humblest life another Woman, to whom likewise it was given to bear in her single hands the whole destiny of man. As the messenger of darkness had appeared to that first woman, and she yielded in the trial, severing the bond which united her race with its Maker, so the messenger of light appeared to that second Woman; once more the whole lot of man hung upon a creature; but she did not sink under the burden; rather, armed with incomparable humility, she bore the destiny of the race intrusted to her up to the very throne of God; a divine Person became her Son, and she, by accepting the rank of Virgin-Mother, restored to her sex, so long a byword for weakness and untrustedness, far more than the honour it had lost. As Eve, the occasion of her husband's disinheritance and her children's fall, marks the position held by woman through all the centuries preceding Christ, which are simply the carrying out

of the fall in its consequences; so Mary, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer, establishes through all generations of her children the absolute rank and place of woman. In the society founded by Mary's Son woman takes equal rank with man, as a human being joint partaker with him of the promises made and the inheritance bequeathed. Her rank relative to man, in the first society of home, is neither taken away nor altered, but is made secondary to the former. This place, unknown to the heathen, feebly and intermittently acknowledged by the Jew, is first of all her Christian place; and the subsequent relations are not done away with, but ennobled and consecrated by it. When she is ennobled in herself, how should she not be nobler in her virginal purity, or in her special relations of wife and mother?

Man and woman then being first restored in themselves, marriage the primary relation of society is restored in them. That absolute restoration was the glorious work of the Child born in the cave of Bethlehem, not only had its source in His Incarnation, but subsisted by virtue of perpetual union with it. Now the same union was applied to the basis of social life. Marriage in its first idea was not a civil contract, the work of man naturally yearning for society, but the institution of God created in view of the Incarnation as future in time, but predetermined before all things: so that the words spoken by Adam under divine inspiration,

when first beholding his wife as brought to him by his Creator, had a secret but a certain reference to the act of that Creator in Himself espousing human nature. And the seven attributes which belong to its original institution, as we have numbered them above, that is, society, help and support in forming it by the bearing and rearing of children, subordination in it of woman to man, which is tempered by affection, indissolubility, unity, and sanctity, were given to it as an image of the Incarnation yet future and undisclosed. For the restoration of marriage it only needed to unfold the latent sacrament. Every one of these parts in the original institution was in Christian teaching supported by a divine counterpart. Thus the natural society of man and woman was viewed as the germ of the sacred society of men redeemed; the natural propagation and education of the race became the nursery for the corporeal increase of the Church; for how should it profit the offspring to be born unless it be reborn, since, in the words of St. Augustine, it is born unto punishment unless it be reborn unto life?† The subordination of woman to man is consecrated by the relation which the former bears to the Church, and the latter to Christ; and so their mutual affection represents that which the mystical

* "Quamvis enim matrimonio, quatenus naturæ est officium, conveniat, ut dissolvi non possit, tamen id maxime fit quatenus est sacramentum ; qua ex re etiam in omnibus, quæ naturæ lege ejus propria sunt, summam perfectionem consequitur." Cat. Conc. Trid. 2, c. xi.

† De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia, lib. i. c. 19.

Bridegroom and Bride bear to each other. The bond of marriage is indissoluble because the Church is the Spouse for ever, who may never be repudiated; it is one, because there cannot be two Churches or two Christs; it is holy, because holiness is the end of the whole union between Christ and His Church. In all these the natural relation becomes supported by supernatural assistance, and is the image of a divine original; and so all the qualities of marriage as it exists in the law of nature obtain by virtue of the sacrament their highest perfection. This is that great sacrament of marriage which the Church first set forth to the world at its age of utmost moral impotence and incontinence, under Tiberius and Nero, the wife-murderers; which it impressed on all the divine society in the face of the degenerate heathen and luxurious carnal Jew; which it guarded against the wild force and untamed passions of the northern barbarians, when they broke in on the civil polity of the empire; which the Sovereign Pontiffs at the first creation of modern society made the public law of Europe; which they maintained unbroken and respected against reluctant kings ever ready to use their power for the rejection of a yoke which bound them to an equality with the weaker sex, and repelled every caprice of passion and appetite of change.

Thus the restored society of man with woman rested for its basis on the Incarnation itself, and