ned to be intended in a purely Pickwickian sense; and
a Rev. Mr. Boyd, of St. Louis, has even gone so far as to produce the
doughty apostle before a woman-suffrage society, as on their side of
that argument. This second conversion of St. Paul impresses one as even
more remarkable than his first. It took an "angel of God" to show him
the error of his ways in Ephesus, but one little Baptist preacher did it
this time--all by himself. Truly St. Paul is getting easier to deal with
than he used to be.

But to resume, Maine, in tracing the amalgamation of the later Roman
(Pagan) law with the archaic laws of a lower civilization (the result
of which was Christian law), shows that the Church, while it chose the
Roman laws, which had arrived at so high a state, for others, _retained
for women, and particularly for wives, the least favorable_ of the
Roman, eked out with the archaic _Patria Potestas_ and the more
degrading provisions of the earlier civilizations. Maine reluctantly
says that the jurisconsults of the day contended for better laws for
wives, but that the Church prevailed in most instances, and established
the more oppressive ones.

With certain of these laws--the worst ones--I cannot deal here for
obvious reasons; but a few of them I may be permitted to give without
offence to the modesty of any one.

Blackstone says: "By marriage the husband and wife are one person
in law; that is, the very being or legal _existence of the woman
is suspended_ during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband. The husband becomes her _baron or
lord_--she his _servant_. Upon this principle of the union of person
in husband and wife depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and
disabilities they acquire by marriage."

That is to say the husband acquires all the rights, and the wife all the
disabilities; and the Church wishing to be fair has made the latter as
many as possible.

"And therefore," continues Blackstone, "it is also generally true, that
all compacts made between husband and wife, _when single, are voided
by the intermarriage_." The working of this principle has been so often
illustrated as to render comment unnecessary. A wife retains no rights
which her husband is bound to respect, no matter how solemn the compact
before marriage, nor what her belief in its strength might have been.

Fortunately for women, happily for wives, men are more decent than their
religion; and the