being overtaxed, and to insist that it shall receive proper education. The Churches from all time have treated the wife as the handmaid of the husband; bound to submit to ill-treatment, to spoliation, and to unfaithfulness at his hands, with none or with the slightest possible redress. The State has insensibly remodelled its customs till a woman in every civilised country can own property, can live apart from her husband, and in certain cases can retain the guardianship of her children. In these instances the State has done little more than many excellent though not typical churchmen have always desired to see done. In one remarkable particular, secular politicians deserve the credit of having discerned and successfully applied a new principle in morality—the duty of tenderness to the brute creation. No doubt it has always been natural for good men to feel compassion for everything that is capable of suffering; but even men like St. Anselm and St. Francis,[1] who felt this instinctively, never raised it to the rank of a religious obligation. In one remarkable instance—the opposition to vivisection for scientific purposes—the reformers have proceeded on the transcendental ground that humanity at large has no right to purchase relief from its own suffering by torturing the helpless. The question is not whether all these changes are maturely thought out and administered with the wisest possible limitations. The broad fact can hardly be disputed that secular civilisation, "the wisdom and the wit of this world,"[2] is informed with a moral purpose, and is steadily working out what we may call the Christian law of life, though it
- ↑ Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, lib. ii. cap. iii. 27, 28; Milman's Latin Christianity, vol. iv. p. 269.
- ↑ Sermons by Dean Church, p. 120.
