oming acute.

It is necessary to make clear that, as is here assumed at the outset,
"man" and "husband" are not quite the same thing, even when they refer to
the same person. No doubt that is also true of "woman" and "wife." A woman
in her quality as woman may be a different kind of person from what she is
in her function as wife. But in the case of a man the distinction is more
marked. One may know a man well in the world as a man and not know him at
all in his home as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfavourably
revealed in the latter capacity. It is simply that he is different.

The explanation is not really far to seek. A man in the world is in vital
response to the influences around him. But a husband in the home is
playing a part which was created for him long centuries before he was
born. He is falling into a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit
many masculine human needs but has become rigidly traditionalised. Thus
the part no longer corresponds accurately to the player's nature nor to
the circumstances under which it has to be played.

In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several
thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has
throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State
of which the husband and father is head. Classic paganism and Christianity
differed on many points, but they were completely at one on this. The
Roman system was on a patriarchal basis and continued to be so
theoretically even when in practise it came to allow great independence to
the wife. Christianity, although it allowed complete spiritual freedom to
the individual, introduced no fundamentally new theory of the family, and,
indeed, re-inforced the old theory by regarding the family as a little
church of which the husband was the head. Just as Christ is the head of
the Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the husband is the head of
the wife; therefore, as it was constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine, the most influential of
Christian Fathers, even said that a wife should be proud to consider
herself as the servant of her husband, his _ancilla_, a word that had in
it the suggestion of slave. That was the underlying assumption throughout
the Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peoples, having always been
accustomed to wife-purchase before their conversion, had found it quite
easy to assimilate the