On the very threshold of the Bible, in the very first chapters of
Genesis, it is enunciated in its most ideal purity and perfection.
But in practice it was never fulfilled. No man seems to have
attempted to fulfil it. Man becomes a polygamist, lower than the
very birds of the air. Abraham, the father of the faithful, has his
Sarah, his princess-wife: but he has others beside, as many as he
will. And so has David in like wise, to the grief and harm of both
him and Abraham.

So, it would seem, had the majority of the Jews till after the
Captivity; and even then the law of divorce seems to have been as
indulgent toward the man as it was unjust and cruel toward the
woman. Then our blessed Lord reasserted the ideal and primaeval
law. He testified in behalf of woman, the puppet of a tyrant who
repudiated her upon the most frivolous pretext, and declared that in
the beginning God made them male and female; the one husband for the
one wife. But his words fell on unwilling ears. His disciples
answered, that if the case of a man with his wife be such, it is not
good for a man to marry. And such, as a fact, was the general
opinion of Christendom for many centuries.

But of that, as of other sayings of our Lord's, were his own words
fulfilled, that the kingdom of God is as if a man should put seed
into the ground, and sleep and wake, and the seed should spring up,
and bear fruit, he knew not how.

In due course of time, when the Teutonic nations were Christianised,
there sprang up among them an idea of married love, which showed
that our Lord's words had at last fallen on good ground, and were
destined to bear fruit an hundredfold.