“And the head of Christ is God.”  Is Christ therefore not equal with God?  Is there superiority and inferiority between the Father and the Son?  If because the apostle declares that the man is the head of the woman, the proposition is to be taken for granted that, in consequence, she is not his equal but an inferior, we may, with equal propriety and fairness, quote the same text to prove, and prove as conclusively, that the Son is not equal with, but is inferior to, the Father.  God may be understood to be the head of Christ in regard to his manhood, and that only.  The Scriptures amply testify that he is not only co-eternal with the Father, but coequal with him as well.  There is neither inferiority nor superiority in the Divine nature between the Father and the Son; and so also, since man and woman are derived from one nature, being both human, there is neither superiority nor inferiority between them.  They are coequal.

Is there, then, no distinction made between the sexes in the text?  Certainly there is.  Men were directed to remove their caps or turbans when they prayed or prophesied in public, while women, on the contrary, were to remain with their heads covered; that is, to keep veiled when they prayed or prophesied in public.  The latter, it is evident, was simply a prudential or local arrangement.  Throughout the East, and more especially in heathen countries, it was the custom for women to be veiled when they made their appearance in public; but immodest women not unfrequently violated the usage, appearing in public unveiled.  In the state of society then in Corinth, for a Christian woman to have appeared in public, or to have taken any prominent part in an assembly with her head uncovered, would have placed her in a false position before unbelievers, both Jews and Gentiles.  That their liberty under the Gospel, then, might not be made occasion of offense by gainsayers, against the cause of Christ, that their good should not be evil spoken of by the profane multitude, the apostle counseled them to submit to the usages and restraints which the customs of the times and place imposed on women, wherever the usages or restraints so imposed were not in themselves sinful.  In the same spirit he returned Onesimus to his master; not that he thereby gave his sanction to slavery, but in this, as other directions regarding civil affairs, advising submission to the existing state of things, “that the Gospel be not blamed.”  The effecting of civil or political reforms, however much they might be needed, was not the immediate object of Paul’s preaching or writing.  His grand, all-absorbing business was to proclaim the Gospel in all its fullness, trusting to its benign influence to right every wrong.  There is no doubt Paul clearly understood and did not intend to controvert the declaration of the prophet Joel (ii, 28), which was quoted by Peter as being one evidence of the ushering in of the Christian dispensation (Acts ii, 17, 18):  “And it shall come to pass in the last days,