“I’ve seen that, Allan.  Nance undoubtedly has a vein of selfishness.  Instead of striving to please her husband, she—­well, she has practically intimated to me that a wife has the right to please herself.  Of course, she didn’t say it brutally in just those words, but—­”

“It’s the modern spirit, Aunt Bell—­the spirit of unbelief.  It has made what we call the ’new woman’—­that noxious flower on the stalk of scientific materialism.”

He turned and wrote this phrase rapidly on a pad at his elbow, while Aunt Bell waited expectantly for more.

“There’s a sermon that writes itself, Aunt Bell.  ’Woman’s deterioration under Modern Infidelity to God.’  As truly as you live, this thing called the ‘new woman’ has grown up side by side with the thing called the higher criticism.  And it’s natural.  Take away God’s word as revealed in the Scriptures and you make woman a law unto herself.  Man’s state is then wretched enough, but contemplate woman’s!  Having put aside Christ’s authority, she naturally puts aside man’s, hence we have the creature who mannishly desires the suffrage and attends club meetings and argues, and has views—­views, Aunt Bell, on the questions of the day—­the woman who, as you have just succinctly said of your niece, ’believes she has a right to please herself!’ There is the keynote of the modern divorce evil, Aunt Bell—­she has a right to please herself.  Believing no longer in God, she no longer feels bound by His commandment:  ’Wives be subject to your husbands!’ Why, Aunt Bell, if you can imagine Christianity shorn of all its other glories, it would still be the greatest religion the world has ever known, because it holds woman sternly in her sphere and maintains the sanctity of the home.  Now, I know nothing of the real state of Nancy’s faith, but the fact that she believes she has a right to please herself is enough to convince me.  I would stake my right arm this moment, upon just this evidence, that Nancy has become an unbeliever.  When I let her know as plainly as English words can express it that she is not pleasing me, she looks either sullen or flippant—­thus showing distinctly a loss of religious faith.”

“You ought to make a stunning sermon of that, Allan.  I think society needs it.”

“It does, Aunt Bell, it does!  And we are going from bad to worse.  I foresee the time in this very age of ours when no woman will continue to be wife to a man except by the dictates of her own lawless and corrupt nature—­when a wife will make so-called love her only rule—­when she will brazenly disregard the law of God and the word of his only begotten crucified Son, unless she can continue to feel what she calls ’love and respect’ for the husband who chose her.  We prize liberty, Aunt Bell, but liberty with woman has become license since she lost faith in the word of God that holds her subject to man.  We should be thankful that the mother Church still stands firm on that rock—­the rock of woman’s