This brings us to consider the case of another no less momentous relationship, and the kind of compromise in the matter of religious conformity which it justifies or imposes.  It constantly happens that the husband has wholly ceased to believe the religion to which his wife clings with unshaken faith.  We need not enter into the causes why women remain in bondage to opinions which so many cultivated men either reject or else hold in a transcendental and non-natural sense.  The only question with which we are concerned is the amount of free assertion of his own convictions which a man should claim and practise, when he knows that such convictions are distasteful to his wife.  Is it lawful, as it seems to be in dealing with parents, to hold his conviction silently?  Is it lawful either positively or by implication to lead his wife to suppose that he shares her opinions, when in truth he rejects them?

If it were not for the maxims and practice in daily use among men otherwise honourable, one would not suppose it possible that two answers could be given to these questions by any one with the smallest pretence of principle or self-respect.  As it is, we all of us know men who deliberately reject the entire Christian system, and still think it compatible with uprightness to summon their whole establishments round them at morning and evening, and on their knees to offer up elaborately formulated prayers, which have just as much meaning to them as the entrails of the sacrificial victim had to an infidel haruspex.  We see the same men diligently attending religious services; uttering assents to confessions of which they really reject every syllable; kneeling, rising, bowing, with deceptive solemnity; even partaking of the sacrament with a consummate devoutness that is very edifying to all who are not in the secret, and who do not know that they are acting a part, and making a mock both of their own reason and their own probity, merely to please persons whose delusions they pity and despise from the bottom of their hearts.

On the surface there is certainly nothing to distinguish this kind of conduct from the grossest hypocrisy.  Is there anything under the surface to relieve it from this complexion?  Is there any weight in the sort of answer which such men make to the accusation that their conformity is a very degrading form of deceit, and a singularly mischievous kind of treachery?  Is the plea of a wish to spare mental discomfort to others an admissible and valid plea?  It seems to us to be none of these things, and for the following among other reasons.

If a man drew his wife by lot, or by any other method over which neither he nor she has any control, as in the case of parents, perhaps he might with some plausibleness contend that he owed her certain limited deferences and reserves, just as we admit that he may owe them to his parents.  But this is not the case.  Marriage, in this country at least, is the result of mutual choice.  If men and women