law.  Contrast with this our Saviour’s words, “He which made them at the beginning made them male and female....  What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder."[i] From which simple utterance have resulted monogamy and (in the absence of adultery) the indissolubility of the marriage bond.  While in respect of conjugal duties we have such large, but sufficiently intelligible, commands as “to render due benevolence,"[j] whereby, while the obligations of the marriage state are maintained, Christianity is saved from the impurities which, in expounding the ordinances of Mohammed, surround the sexual ethics of Islam, and cast so foul a stain upon its literature.

[Sidenote:  Elevation of woman.] Take, again, the place of woman in the world.  We need no injunction of the veil or the harem.  As the temples of the Holy Ghost, the body is to be kept undefiled, and every one is “to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor."[k] Men are to treat “the elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity."[l] Women are to “adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety."[m] These, and such like maxims embrace the whole moral fitness of the several relations and duties which they define.  They are adapted for all ages of time and for all conditions of men.  They are capable of being taken by every individual for personal guidance, according to his own sense of propriety, and they can be accommodated by society at large with a due reference to the habits and customs of the day.  The attempt of Mohammed to lay down, with circumstantial minuteness, the position of the female sex, the veiling of her person, and her withdrawal from the gaze of man, has resulted in seclusion and degradation; while the spirit of the Gospel, and injunctions like that of “giving honor to the wife as to the weaker vessel,"[n] have borne the fruit of woman’s elevation, and have raised her to the position of influence, honor, and equality which (notwithstanding the marital superiority of the husband in the ideal of a Christian family) she now occupies in the social scale.

[Sidenote:  Relations with the State.  Christianity leaves humanity free to expand.] In the type of Mussulman government which (though not laid down in the Koran) is founded upon the spirit of the faith and the precedent of the Prophet the civil is indissolubly blended with the spiritual authority, to the detriment of religious liberty and political progress.  The Ameer, or commander of the faithful, should, as in the early times, so also in all ages, be the Imam, or religious chief; and as such he should preside at the weekly cathedral service.  It is not a case of the Church being subject to the State, or the State being subject to the Church.  Here (as we used to see in the papal domains) the Church is the State, and the State the Church.  They both are one.  And in this we have another cause of the backwardness and depression of Mohammedan society.  Since the