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Rh actually, from the point of view of the modern student, grotesque; read as symbolising fundamental truth, it is precious and illuminating still.

No help meet for man can be found in all the circuit of created life outside the sphere of humanity itself. Fundamental equality of nature must condition sexual union, and not less must determine the intimacy and permanence of that union. "The man said, This is now bones of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." The prophetic teaching, then, had checked, and to a great extent corrected, the tendency of the law and the history to perpetuate, under sacred sanctions, a properly obsolete type of marriage.

It must be added that the circumstances of the nation in the period preceding the advent of Christ had contributed to the same result