is yet reached?

[Footnote 1: Story's _Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal_,
sec. 84, p. 89.]

OBEY

After witnessing the marriage ceremony of the Episcopal Church, the other
day, I walked down the aisle with the young rector who had officiated. It
was natural to speak of the beauty of the Church service on an occasion
like that; but, after doing this, I felt compelled to protest against the
unrighteous pledge to obey. "I hope," I said, "to live to see that word
expunged from the Episcopal service, as it has been from that of the
Methodists. The Roman Catholics, you know, have never had it."

"Why do you object?" he asked. "Is it because you know that they will not
obey?"

"Because they ought not," I said.

"Well," said he, after a few moments' reflection, and looking up frankly,
"I do not think they ought!"

Here was a young clergyman of great earnestness and self-devotion, who
included it among the sacred duties of his life to impose upon ignorant
young girls a solemn obligation, which he yet thought they ought not to
incur, and did not believe that they would keep. There could hardly be a
better illustration of the confusion in the public mind, or the manner in
which "the subjection of woman" is being outgrown, or the subtile way in
which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and baptized
"duty."

The advocates of woman suffrage are constantly reproved for using the terms
"subjection," "oppression," and "slavery," as applied to woman. They simply
commit the same sin as that committed by the original abolitionists. They
are "as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice." Of course they talk
about oppression and emancipation. It is the word _obey_ that constitutes
the one, and shows the need of the other. Whoever is pledged to obey is
technically and literally a slave, no matter how many roses surround the
chains. All the more so if the slavery is self-imposed, and surrounded by
all the prescriptions of religion. Make the marriage tie as close as church
or state can make it; but let it be equal, impartial. That it may be so,
the word _obey_ must be abandoned or made reciprocal. Where invariable
obedience is promised, equality is gone.

That there may be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the marriage
covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic explanations. These are
generally simple, and brutal enough to be understood. The Hebrew ceremony,
when the bride