children was hardly less perplexing to His religious contemporaries than His respectful treatment of women. His disciples, we read, "marvelled that He was speaking with a woman" when they found Him in converse with the woman of Samaria by the side of Jacob's well; and they moved Him to "indignation" by "rebuking" the Jewish mothers who, with a true insight into His mind, "brought unto Him little children that He should touch them."
IV.—Christ's doctrine of purity as something not to be narrowed down to specific acts, but rather to be conceived of as a chaste and reverent spirit inhabiting the mind, and holding under control the very thoughts and intents of the heart, necessarily tended, wherever it was in any measure sincerely accepted, to purify and exalt the relationship of the sexes. Far more powerful than specific regulations was that lofty declaration of the Sermon on the Mount:
