women. It has been maintained that woman is man's greatest blessing and again that she is a curse. Also the two judgments have been united by saying that she is a cheat and a delusion, that is, she looks like a blessing while she is a curse. Each of those exaggerated views supports the other. Every blessing may appear doubtful, under circumstances; every curse will sometimes appear to be a blessing. What was most important about both these views was that man was regarded as independent and complete in the first place and the woman was brought to him as a helpmeet or assistant; at least as an inferior whose status and destiny came from her position as an adjunct. That was the position of woman in the man-family. We have abandoned part of the harshness of this construction of the status of woman and all the unkind deductions from it; the moral inferences, however, remain, and we regard them as self-evident and eternal. Loyalty to her husband is the highest virtue of a woman, and devotion to her family and sacrifice for it are the field of heroism for her. We speak of the Christian family as the highest form of the family, and in our literature and our current code the Christian family is considered as furnishing women with their grand arena for self-culture and social work. I cannot find that Christianity has done anything to shape the father—family; of the Jewish form the Old Testament tells us hardly anything. In Proverbs we find some weighty statements of general truths, universally accepted, and some ideal descriptions of a good wife. The words of Lemuel in chapter 31 are the only didactic treatment of the good wife in the Old Testament; she is described as a good housekeeper, a good cook, and a diligent needlewoman. Such was the ideal Jewish woman. In the New Testament there is no doctrine
