He threw up his head exactly as if I had hit him on the jaw: "It's
weakness in me, I know," he said.

"I should have rather called it weakness in them. But suppose you are
right, and that it's weakness not to be able to desire promiscuous
suffering for others, would you go further and say that it is Christian
for those, who have not experienced a certain kind of suffering, to force
that particular kind on others?"

He sat silent for a full minute, trying evidently to reach to the bottom
of my thought.

"Surely not," he said at last, "except as ministers of God's laws."

"You do not then think that it is Christian for the husband of such a
woman to keep her in that state of suffering--not being, of course, a
minister of God?"

He began stammering at that: "I--I----" he said. "No; that is, I think
not-not Christian. No, certainly."

"Then, such a marriage, if persisted in, makes of the wife indeed a
Christian, but of the husband--the reverse."

"The answer to that is clear," he said quietly: "The husband must
abstain."

"Yes, that is, perhaps, coherently Christian, on your theory: They would
then both suffer. But the marriage, of course, has become no marriage.
They are no longer one flesh."