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 from the disciplines, sorrows, and joys of home.

III.—The Reformation brought into general knowledge the life of Christ, and the writings of the apostles. In this circumstance may be recognised the most powerful of all the forces which have tended to exalt the theory and practice of Christian marriage. For when full allowance has been made for ascetic elements in the Apostolic teaching, for their mistaken expectation that the world was about to end, for the moral confusions of their hereditary Judaism, it remains the case that the New Testament, taken as a whole, is fatal to asceticism, eminently favourable to all those pure and gentle sentiments which most flourish within the domestic sphere, and carries to the individual, in the most moving and salutary of its expressions, the spirit of Jesus Christ.

Experience would teach the reformers and their followers that they could not find in the Old Testament a code of Christian morals; in due course the historical spirit would be