This Christian ideal was doubtless intended to fulfil those restrictions of the Levitical Law which were to safeguard the health of the wife and secure the best conditions for the unborn child; laws and regulations to the observance of which the Jew doubtless owes his splendid physique and his still more splendid mental endowments, which, though he is the fewest of all peoples, bring him everywhere to the forefront,—­in finance, in literature, in music, in general capacity,—­and to which, I should be inclined to add, he owes his comparatively slow rate of increase, else it is difficult to understand the small numerical strength of this extraordinary race; but I know that this is a disputed point.  No jot or tittle of these laws and regulations can pass away until they are fulfilled in some larger truth; for ignore them or not, they are founded on physiological laws; and it is on mothers’ recognizing this larger truth in the advice they give, and on their bringing in the Christian ideal, that the future of marriage mainly depends, and its being made more consonant with the higher and more independent position of women than it at present is.

Whilst the sight is so familiar of wives with health broken down and life made a burden, possibly even premature death incurred, by their being given no rest from the sacred duties of motherhood, to say nothing of the health of the hapless child born under such circumstances, can we wonder that the modern woman often shows a marked distaste to marriage and looks upon it as something low and sensual?  Or can we wonder that married men, with so sensual an ideal of so holy a state, should, alas! so largely minister to the existence of an outcast class of women?

On the other hand, the remedy resorted to is often worse than the disease.  I confess I have stood aghast at the advice given by Christian mothers, often backed up by a doctor whom they affirm to be a Christian man, in order to save the health of the wife or limit the increase of the family.  The heads of the profession, in England, I believe, are sound on this point, a conference having been held some years ago by our leading medical men to denounce all such “fruits of philosophy” as physically injurious and morally lowering.

But if we want to know what their practical results are, the moral gangrene they are to the national life when once they have firmly taken hold of a nation, we have only to look across the channel at France—­France with her immense wealth, but rapidly declining population, which in less than a century will reduce her from a first-rate to a second-or third-rate power, so that her statesmen have actually debated the expediency of offering a premium on illegitimacy in the shape of free nurture to all illegitimate children,—­illegitimate citizens being better in their estimation than no citizens at all.

Would we have the Anglo-Saxon race enter on this downward grade?  If not, then let us women silently band together to preserve the sanctity of the family, of the home, and sternly to bar out the entrance of all that defileth—­all that sensualizes her men and enfeebles their self-mastery, all that renders the heart of her women too craven to encounter the burdens of being the mothers of a mighty race, flowing out into all the lands to civilize and Christianize, and “bear the white man’s burthen.”