Such a sermon as the above, preached to woman, under the fall blaze of nineteenth century civilization, needs few comments. In it woman's inferiority and subordination are as openly asserted as at any time during the dark ages. According to Rev. Knox-Little, woman possesses no responsibility; she is deprived of conscience, intelligent thought, self-respect, and is simply an appendage to man, a thing. As the clergy in the middle ages divided rights into those of persons and things, themselves being the persons, the laity, things, so the Rev. Knox-Little and his ilk of to-day divide the world into persons and things,—men being the persons and women the things.

It should require but little thought upon woman's part to see how closely her disabilities are interwoven with present religious belief as to her inferiority and pre-destined subordination. If she needs aid to thought, the Knox-Littles will help her. Have protests against his blasphemous doctrine been made by his brother clergymen? Not one. Has a single church denied his degrading theory? Not one. He has been allowed in this sermon to stand as the representative, not only of High-Church theology in regard to woman, but as expressing the belief of all churches in her creation and existence as an inferior and appendage to man.

There is scarcely a Protestant sect that has not, within a few years, in some way, placed itself upon record in regard to woman's subordination. The Pan-Presbyterian Council that assembled in Edinburgh a few years since, refused to admit a woman even as a listener to its proceedings, although women constitute at least two-thirds of the membership of that Church. A solitary woman who persisted in remaining to listen to the discussions of this body, was removed by force; "six stalwart Presbyterians" lending their ungentle aid to her ejection. The same Pan-Presbyterian body when in session in Philadelphia in the summer of 1880, laughed to scorn the suggestion of a liberal member, that the status of woman in the Church should receive some consideration. The speaker referred to the Sisters of Charity in the Catholic Church, and to the position of woman among the Quakers; but although the question was twice introduced, it was as often met with derisive laughter, and no action was taken upon it. A vote of the New England Society of Friends at their meeting in Newport, 1878, proves that as liberal as they have been considered toward woman, even they have not in the past held her as upon a plane of perfect equality. This body voted that hereafter "women shall be eligible to office in the management of the Society, shall sign all conveyances of real estate made by the Society, and shall be considered equal to the opposite sex."

The Congregational Church is placed upon record through laws governing certain of its bodies:

"By the word 'church' is meant the adult males duly admitted and retained in the First Evangelical Congregational Church in Cambridgeport, present at any regular meeting of said church and voting by a majority."[214]

In the Unitarian and Universalist churches, which ordain women to preach and administer the ordinances, these women pastors are made to feel that the innovation is not universally acceptable.

The Methodist Church, professing to stand upon a broad basis, still refuses to ordain its most influential women preachers, and, within the year, has even deprived them of license, though one of them[215] has brought more converts to the Church than a dozen of its most influential bishops during the same period. To such bitter lengths has the opposition to woman's ordination been carried, that a certain reverend gentlemen, in debating the subject, declared that he would oppose the admission of the mother of our Lord into the ministry, the debate taking on a most unseemly form. The Syracuse Sunday Morning Courier of March 4, 1877, reported this debate as follows:

WOMEN AS PREACHERS.

The subject of permitting women to preach in Methodist pulpits was incidentally, but rather racily discussed at the Methodist ministers' meeting in New York city a few days since. A Miss Oliver—a more or less reverend lady—had been invited to preach to the ministers at their next meeting, and the question was raised, by what authority she was invited? Thereupon Brother Buckley took the floor and gave expression to his dissent in the following terms:

I am opposed to inviting any woman to preach before this meeting. If the mother of our Lord were on earth I should oppose her preaching here. [Sensation and murmurs of disapproval]. Oh, I do not mind that, I like at the beginning of a speech to find that there are two sides to my question. There is no power in the Methodist Church by which a woman can be licensed to preach; this is history, this is the report made at the last General Conference. It is, therefore, not legal for any quarterly conference to license a woman to preach, nevertheless here is a woman who claims to have such a license, and we are asked to invite her to preach.

A Brother: We have the right!

Brother Buckley: Oh, you have the right to believe the moon is made of green cheese, but yet have no right to commit the ministers of this city on an unsettled Church question. [Laughter and applause]. The tendency of men—now here is a chance to hiss—the tendency of men to endeavor to force female preachers on the Church, and the desire to run after female preachers, is, as Dr. Finney said to the students at Oberlin, an aberration of amativeness. [Roars of laughter and applause]. When men are moved by women, then by men under the same circumstances, it is certainly due to an aberration of amativeness. [Applause and more laughter]. For some time the male and female students at Oberlin used to have their prayer-meetings together, but after a time they divided, and the young men complained to Dr. Finney that the Holy Ghost no longer came with equal force. Dr. Finney said this showed amativeness, or that the men were back-sliding. [Applause].

Brother Dickinson: As to the talk of amativeness, what about our holiness meetings and seaside meetings, where we go to hear woman, and to be moved by her words and her personality? [Applause]. Why are there so many women in the Church? It must be amativeness which urges them to go and hear men preach. [Laughter].

Dr. Roach: If this meeting has any dignity, has any Christian intelligence, has any weight of character, it ought not to take this action. [Laughter]. What wildness, what fanaticism, what strange freaks will we not take on next? [Laughter and applause].

Brother McAllister and others took part in the discussion, and finally, amid cries of "Motion," "Question," points of order, and the utmost confusion, the question was put, and the meeting refused to invite Miss Oliver to preach by a vote of 46 to 38. The result was received with ejaculations of "Amen" and "Thank God" and "God bless Brother Buckley." The Chair announced that Brother Kittrell will preach next Monday on "Entire Satisfaction," and the meeting adjourned.

Miss Oliver appealed to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in session in Cincinnati, May, 1880, for full installment and ordination. In this appeal she said:

I am so thoroughly convinced that the Lord has laid commands upon me in this direction, that it becomes with me a question of my own soul's salvation. I have passed through tortures to which the flames of martyrdom would be nothing, for they would end in a day; and through all this time, and to-day, I could turn off to positions of comparative ease and profit. I ask you, fathers and brethren, tell me what you would do in my place? Tell me what you would wish the Church to do toward you, were you in my place? Please apply the golden rule, and vote in Conference accordingly.

As answer to this appeal, and in reply to all women seeking the ministry of that Church, the Conference passed the following resolution:

Resolved, That women have already all the rights and privileges in the Methodist Church that are good for them, and that it is not expedient to make any change in the books of discipline that would open the doors for their ordination to the ministry.[216]

An Episcopal Church Convention meeting in Boston in the summer of 1877, busied itself in preparing canons upon marriage and divorce, thus aiming to reach the finger of the Protestant Church down to a control of this most private family relation. The Diocesan Convention of South Carolina, in the spring of 1878, denied women the right to vote upon Church matters, although some churches in the diocese counted but five male members.

Not alone in her request for ordination has woman met with opposition, but in her effort for any separate church work. The formation of woman's foreign missionary societies was bitterly opposed by the different evangelical denominations, although they have raised more money than the male societies have ever been able to do—even helping them pay old debts—and have reached large classes of their own sex whom the male societies were powerless to touch. By thus supplementing men's work, they have made themselves acceptable.

Not only do councils, convocations, conferences, conventions, synods, and assemblies proclaim woman's inferiority, but Sunday-schools teach the same doctrine. A letter from a correspondent of The National Citizen and Ballot-Box (Syracuse, N. Y.), in August, 1880, said:

Our Sunday-schools here have just finished the lesson on the creation and fall of man, and those of us who are capable of feeling, felt keenly the thrusts at woman for her infidelity to God's laws, and her overpowering influence in dragging man from his exalted position in life into a bondage of sin and death, and that she is to be held responsible for all the accumulated sins of the ages. One man said that "had not Eve been lurking around where she had no business, the devil would never have tempted her." Another said, "Had it not been for woman, we might to-day be living in ease and splendor," and I listened to hear them say the fallen angel was a woman.

This same doctrine is taught in the public schools. The Republican, of Havre de Grace, Maryland, in its issue of August 6, 1880, gave the following report of a speech at that time:

Thus spoke Master Showell at the Berlin (Wicomico County) High-School commencement: "By woman was Eden lost and man cursed. If you trust her, give up all hopes of heaven. She can not love, because she is too selfish. She may have a fancy, but that is fleeting. Her smiles are deceit; her vows are traced in sand. She is a thread of candor with a web of wiles. Her charity is hypocrisy; she is deception every way—hair, teeth, complexion, heart, tongue, and all. Oh, I hate you, ye cold composition of art!"

Sermons are frequently preached in opposition to woman's demand for equality of right in Church and State. On the Sunday following the Thirtieth Anniversary Woman Suffrage Convention, held in Rochester, 1878, the Rev. A. H. Strong, D.D., President of the Baptist Theological Seminary of that city, preached upon "Woman's Place and Work," saying:

In the very creation of mankind in the garden of beauty, God ordained the subordination of woman.

This president of a theological seminary, where Christian theology is taught to embryo Christian ministers, said that woman's subordination would be most perfectly seen in the "Christian humility and gentleness and endurance of her character, and in her indisposition to assume the place or do the work of man," forgetting, apparently, that subordination, humility, and endurance are precisely the qualities which tend to destroy nobleness of character.

The sermon was especially directed against the following resolutions of this Convention, which throughout the country met much clerical criticism and opposition:

Resolved, That as the duty of every individual is self-development, the lessons of self-sacrifice and obedience taught women by the Christian Church have been fatal, not only to her own highest interests, but through her have also dwarfed and degraded the race.

Resolved, That the fundamental principle of the Protestant Reformation, the right of individual conscience and judgment in the interpretation of Scripture, heretofore conceded to and exercised by man alone, should now be claimed by woman, and that in her most vital interests she should no longer trust authority, but be guided by her own reason.

Resolved, That it is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, cultivating the emotions at the expense of her reason, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life, with all its high duties, forever in abeyance to that which is to come, that she, and the children she has trained, have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.

Professor Christlieb, a distinguished German clergyman who was in attendance upon the Evangelical Alliance in New York, a few years since, expressed severe condemnation of the marriage relation as he saw it in this country. His criticism is a good exemplification of the general religious view taken of woman's relation to man. After his return to Germany, a young American student called, it is related, upon the professor with a note of introduction, and was cordially received by the German, who, while he praised this country, expressed much solicitude about its future. On being asked his reasons, he frankly expressed his opinion that "the Spirit of Christ" was not here, and proceeded to illustrate his meaning. He seriously declared that on more than one occasion he had heard an American woman say to her husband, "Dear, will you bring me my shawl?" and the husband had brought it! Worse than this, he had seen a husband, returning home at evening, enter the parlor where his wife was sitting—perhaps in the very best chair in the room—and the wife not only did not go and get his slippers and dressing-gown, but she even remained seated, and left him to find a chair as he could. In the view of this noted German clergyman, the principles of the wife's equality with the husband, as shown in the American home, is destructive of Christian principles.[217]

Clerical action to-day, proves woman to hold the same place in the eyes of the Church that she did during the dark ages. Woman is as fully degraded, taking into consideration our civilization, as she ever was. The form alone has changed. She is no longer burned at the stake as a witch; she is no longer prostituted to feudal lords. The age has outgrown a belief in the supernatural, and feudalism is dead; yet the same principle which degraded her five hundred or a thousand years since, still exists, even though its manifestation is not the same. The feminine principle is still looked upon as secondary and inferior,[218] though all the facts of nature and science prove it to extend throughout creation.

It is through the Church idea of woman that the press of the world is filled with scandals like the one that recently agitated the Romish Church, in which the dead Cardinal Antonelli's name was bandied about in courts of law. It is through Church interpretation of woman's position that the suit of his putative daughter, the Countess Lambertina, for his property, was decided against her on the ground that she was "a sacrilegious child." The person who commits sacrilege steals sacred things. "Sacrilegious" means violating sacred things. "A sacrilegious child" is a child who "violated sacred things" by coming into existence. Her father was holy; he did not violate holy things when he violated and ruined a woman's life. He committed no sacrilege in the eyes of the Church. His sin was nothing; but the unfortunate result of his sin was a violation of holy things by the mere fact of her coming into existence. What irony of all that is called holy!

It is because the Church has taught that woman was created solely for man, that in tearing asunder a recent will in New York, it was proven that the husband, indebted though he was to his wife for the beginning of his vast fortune, incarcerated her while sane in a lunatic asylum, because she objected to his practical polygamy by his introduction of a mistress into the family.

Political despotism has now its strongest hold in the theory of woman's created subordination. Woman has been legislated for as a class, and not as a human being upon a basis of equality with man, but as an inferior to whom a different code was applicable.

Our recent Secretary of State, William M. Evarts, when counsel in the Beecher-Tilton trial, defined woman's legal and theological position as that of subordination to man, declaring that notwithstanding changing customs and the amenities of modern life, women were not free, but were held in the hollow of man's hand, to be crushed at his will.

Then Mr. Evarts read from various legal authorities instances and opinions bearing upon the subjugation of weak wives by strong husbands, the gist of them being that confessions of guilt obtained by such husbands from such wives are not entitled to great weight. He continued:

RECOGNIZING THE PRINCIPLES OF MARRIAGE.

This institution of marriage, framed in our nature, built up in our civilization, studied, contemplated, understood by the jurisprudence of ages, is a solid and real institution, and for its great benefits, and as a necessary part of them, it carries not only the fact of the wife's subordination to the husband, but of the merciful interpretation of that subordination[219] which sensible, instructed men ever accord in practical life, and which the judges pronounce from the bench, and the juries confirm by their verdicts. Now, gentlemen, you may think that is our advanced civilization, when so much of independence is assumed for women, and such entire equality is accorded to them in feeling and in sentiment by their husbands and by the world, that the old rule of the common law interpreting this institution of marriage, by which a wife was never held responsible to the law, or subject to punishment for any crime committed in the presence or under the influence of her husband, was one of those traits of human nature belonging to ruder ages and to past times; but, gentlemen, in our own Court of Appeals, and in the highest tribunals of England, within the last few years, there is an explicit recognition of these principles.

Mr. Evarts cited an English case in which a wife, who participated in a robbery under the guidance of her husband, was acquitted on the ground that she was irresponsible; and he added an argument that the principle of law involved was correct. Then he called attention to a recent case in this State, which he held was a confirmation of the same sound theory.

The teachings of the Church that it was sinful for woman to use her own reason, to think for herself, to question authority, thus fettering her will, together with a false interpretation of Scripture, have been the instruments to hold her, body and soul, in a slavery whose depths of degradation can never be fathomed, whose indescribable tortures can never be understood by man.

Not only has woman suffered in the Church, in society, under the laws, and in the family by this theological degradation of her sex, but in science and literature she has met a like fate. Hypatia, who succeeded her father, Theon, in the government of the Alexandrian school, and whose lectures were attended by the wisest men of Europe, Asia, and Africa, was torn in pieces by a Christian mob afraid of her learning.

A monument erected to Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, as "Patroness of Liberty," was removed from the Church by order of its rector. Harriet Martineau met the most strenuous opposition from bishops in her effort to teach the poor; her day-schools and even her Sunday-schools were broken up by clerical influence. Madam Pepe-Carpentier, founder of the French system of primary instruction, of whom Froebel caught his kindergarten idea, found her labors interrupted, and her life harassed by clerical opposition.

Mary Somerville, the most eminent English mathematician of this century, was publicly denounced in church by Dean Cockburn, of York; and when George Eliot died a few weeks since, her lifeless remains were refused interment in Westminster Abbey, where so many inferior authors of the privileged sex lie buried; the grave even not covering man's efforts toward the degradation of woman.

When Susannah Wesley dared to conduct religious services in her own house, and to pray for the king, contrary to her husband's wishes, he separated from her in consequence. The husband of Annie Besant left her because she dared to investigate the Scriptures for herself, and was sustained by the courts in taking from her the control of her little daughter, simply because the mother thought best not to train her in a special religious belief, but to allow her to wait until her reason developed, that she might decide her religious views for herself. A woman writing in the "Woman's Kingdom" department of The Chicago Inter-Ocean, says:

The orthodox Church has been almost suicidal in its treatment of women (and I write as one whose name still stands on the membership list of the Presbyterian Church). Persons who have not walked with wounded, lacerated hearts through the terrible realities, can form no idea of the suffering occasioned young women whose conscience summoned them to speak for temperance and woman suffrage, by the persecutions encountered in the Church. We have known clergymen come straight from the pulpit where they have talked eloquently of "moral courage," of the heroism of Martin Luther and Calvin and Wesley, and even of Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to meet with a sneer some brave young woman, who, with the same moral courage was proclaiming the truth as revealed unto her. Our young women have been denied admittance into theological schools; they have been compelled to go out into the by-ways and hedges; they have been persecuted for righteousness' sake. The Church has decreed that two-thirds of its members shall be governed by the masculine one-third; but despite this decision, woman will preach and the world will listen.

Not only has woman recognized her own degradation, but the largest-hearted men have also seen it. Thomas W. Higginson, in an address at the anniversary of the Young Men's Christian Union, in New York City, as long ago as 1858, in an address upon women in Christian civilization, said:

No man can ever speak of the position of woman so mournfully as she has done it for herself. Charlotte Bronté, Caroline Norton, and indeed the majority of intellectual women, from the beginning to the end of their lives, have touched us to sadness even in mirth, and the mournful memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, looking back upon years when she had been the chief intellectual joy of English society, could only deduce the hope, "that there might be some other world hereafter, where justice would be done to woman."

The essayist, E. P. Whipple, in a recent speech before the Papyrus Club of Boston, said of George Eliot:

The great masculine creators and delineators of human character, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Göethe, Scott, and the rest, cheer and invigorate us even in the vivid representation of our common humanity in its meanest, most stupid, most criminal forms. Now comes a woman endowed not only with their large discourse of reason, their tolerant views of life, and their intimate knowledge of the most obscure recesses of the human heart and brain, but with a portion of that rich, imaginative humor which softens the savageness of the serious side of life by a quick perception of its ludicrous side, and the result of her survey of life is, that she depresses the mind, while the men of genius animate it, and that she saddens the heart, while they fill it with hopefulness and joy. I do not intend to solve a problem so complicated as this, but I would say, as some approach to an explanation, that this remarkable woman was born under the wrath and curse of what our modern philosophers call "heredity." She inherited the results of man's dealings with woman during a thousand generations of their life together.

Contempt for woman, the result of clerical teaching, is shown in myriad forms. Wife-beating is still so common, even in America, that a number of the States have of late introduced bills especially directed to the punishment of the wife-beater. Great surprise is frequently shown by these men when arrested. "Is she not my wife?" is cried in tones proving the brutal husband had been trained to consider this relationship a sufficient justification for any abuse.

In England, wives are still occasionally led to the market by a halter around the neck to be sold by the husband to the highest bidder.[220] George Borrow, in his singular narrative, "The Rommany Rye," says:

The sale of a wife with a halter around her neck is still a legal transaction in England. The sale must be made in the cattle market, as if she were a mare, "all women being considered as mares by old English law, and indeed called 'mares' in certain counties where genuine old English is still preserved."

It is the boast of America and Europe that woman holds a higher position in the world of work under Christianity than under pagandom. Heathen treatment of woman in this respect often points the moral and adorns the tale of returned missionaries, who are apparently forgetful that servile labor[221] of the severest and most degrading character is performed by Christian women in highly Christian countries. In Germany, where the Reformation had its first inception, woman carries a hod of mortar up steep ladders to the top of the highest buildings; or, with a coal basket strapped to her back, climbs three or four flights of stairs, her husband remaining at the foot, pipe in mouth, awaiting her return to load the hod or basket, that she may make another ascent, the payment for her work going into the husband's hands for his uncontrolled use. Or mayhap this German wife works in the field harnessed by the side of a cow, while her husband-master holds the plough and wields the whip. Or perhaps, harnessed with a dog, she serves the morning's milk, or drags her husband home from work at night.

In France women act as porters, carrying the heaviest burdens and performing the most repulsive labors at the docks, while eating food of so poor a quality that the lessening stature of the population daily shows the result. In Holland and Prussia women drag barges on the canal, and perform the most repulsive agricultural duties. On the Alps[222] husbands borrow and lend their wives, one neighbor not scrupling to ask the loan of another's wife to complete some farming task, which loan is readily granted, with the understanding that the favor is to be returned in kind. In England, scantily clothed women work by the side of nude men in coal pits, and, harnessed to trucks, perform the severe labor of dragging coal up inclined planes to the mouth of the pit, a work testing every muscle and straining every nerve, and so severe that the stoutest men shrink from it; while their degradation in brick-yards and iron mines has commanded the attention of philanthropists and legislators.[223]

A gentleman recently travelling in Ireland blushes for his sex when he sees the employments of women, young and old. They are patient drudges, staggering over the bogs with heavy creels of turf on their backs, or climbing the slopes from the seashore, laden like beasts of burden with the heavy sand-dripping seaweed, or undertaking long journeys on foot into the market towns, bearing weighty hampers of farm produce. In Montenegro, women form the beasts of burden in war, and are counted among the "animals" belonging to the prince. In Italy, that land which for centuries led the world in art, women work in squalor and degradation under the shadow of St. Peter's and the Vatican for four-pence a day; while in America, under the Christianity of the nineteenth century, until within twenty years, she worked on rice and cotton plantations waist-deep in water, or under a burning sun performed the tasks demanded by a cruel master, at whose hands she also suffered the same kind of moral degradation exacted of the serf under feudalism. In some portions of Christendom the "service"[224] of young girls to-day implies their sacrifice to the Moloch of man's unrestrained passions.

Augustine, in his work, "The City of God," taunts Rome with having caused her own downfall. He speaks of her slaves, miserable men, put to labors only fit for the beasts of the field, degraded below them; their condition had brought Rome to its own destruction. If such wrongs contributed to the overthrow of Rome, what can we not predict of the Christian civilization which, in the twentieth century of its existence, degrades its Christian women to labors fit only for the beasts of the field; harnessing them with dogs to do the most menial labors; which drags them below even this, holding their womanhood up to sale, putting both Church and State sanction upon their moral death; which, in some places, as in the city of Berlin, so far recognizes the sale of women's bodies for the vilest purposes as part of the Christian religion, that license for this life is refused until they have partaken of the Sacrament; and which demands of the "10,000 licensed women of the town" of the city of Hamburg, certificates showing that they regularly attend church and also partake of the sacrament?

A civilization which even there has not reached its lowest depths, but which has created in England, as a result of its highest Christian civilization, a class of women under the protection of the State, known as "Queen's women," or "Government women," with direct purpose of more fully protecting man in his departure from the moral law, and which makes woman the hopeless slave of man's lowest nature; a system not confined to England, but already in practice in France, in Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany, and nearly every country in Europe. A system of morality which declares "the necessity" of woman's degradation, and which annually sends its tens of thousands down to a death from which society grants no resurrection.

In a letter to the National Woman's Suffrage Convention, held at St. Louis, May, 1879, upon this condition of Licensed Vice, from Josephine E. Butler, Hon. Secretary of the Federation and the Ladies' National Association for the Protection of Women; a society which has its branches over Europe, and has for years been actively at work against this last most hideous form of slavery for women, Mrs. Butler says:

England holds a peculiar position in regard to the question. She was the last to adopt this system of slavery, and she adopted it in that thorough manner which characterizes the actions of the Anglo-Saxon race. In no other country has prostitution been regulated by law. It has been understood by the Latin races, even when morally enervated, that the law could not without risk of losing its majesty and force sanction illegality and violate justice. In England alone the regulations are law.

This legalization of vice, which is the endorsement of the "necessity" of impurity for man and the institution of the slavery of woman, is the most open denial which modern times have seen of the principle of the sacredness of the individual human being. An English high-class journal dared to demand that women who are unchaste shall henceforth be dealt with "not as human beings, but as foul sewers," or some such "material nuisance" without souls, without rights, and without responsibility. When the leaders of public opinion in a country have arrived at such a point of combined skepticism and despotism as to recommend such a manner of dealing with human beings, there is no crime which that country may not presently legalize, there is no organization of murder, no conspiracy of abominable things that it may not, and in due time will not—have been found to embrace in its guilty methods. Were it possible to secure the absolute physical health of a whole province or an entire continent by the destruction of one, only one poor and sinful woman, woe to that nation which should dare, by that single act of destruction, to purchase this advantage to the many! It will do it at its peril. God will take account of the deed not in eternity only, but in time, it may be in the next or even in the present generation.

The fact of governments lending their official aid to the demoralization of woman by the registration system, shows an utter debasement of law. This system is directly opposed to the fundamental principle of right, that of holding the accused innocent until proven guilty, which until now has been recognized as a part of modern law. Under the registration or license system, all women within the radius of its action are under suspicion; all women are held as morally guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Where this law is in force, all women are under an irresponsible police surveillance, liable to accusation, arrest, examination, imprisonment, and the entrance of their names upon the list of the lewd women of a town. Upon this frightful infraction of justice, we have the sentiments of Sheldon Amos, Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law College of London University. In "The Science of Law," he says, in reference to this very wrong:

The loss of liberty to the extent to which it exists, implies a degradation of the State, and, if persisted in, can only lead to its dissolution. No person or class of persons must be under the cringing fear of having imputed to them offences of which they are innocent, and of being taken into custody in consequence of such imputation. They must not be liable to be detained in custody without so much as a prima facie case being made out, such as in the opinion of a responsible judicial officer leaves a presumption of guilt. They must not be liable to be detained for an indefinite time without having the question of their guilt or innocence investigated by the best attainable methods. When the fact comes to be inquired into, the best attainable methods of eliciting the truth must be used. In default of any one of these securities, public liberty must be said to be proportionately at a very low ebb.

Great effort has been made to introduce this system into the United States, and a National Board of Health, created by Congress in 1879, is carefully watched in its action, lest its irresponsible powers lead to its encroachment upon the liberties and personal rights of woman. A resolution adopted March 2, 1881, at a meeting of the New York Committee appointed to thwart the effort to license vice in this country, shows the need of its watchful care.

Resolved, That this committee has learned with much regret and apprehension of the action of the American Public Health Association, at its late annual meeting in New Orleans, in adopting a sensational report commending European governmental regulation of prostitution, and looking to the introduction in this country, with modifications, through the medium of State legislative enactments and municipal ordinances, of a kindred immoral system of State-regulated social vice.

From all these startling facts in Church and State we see that our government and religion are alike essentially masculine in their origin and development. All the evils that have resulted from dignifying one sex and degrading the other may be traced to this central error: a belief in a trinity of masculine Gods in One, from which the feminine element is wholly eliminated.[225] And yet in the Scriptural account of the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the text plainly recognizes the feminine as well as the masculine element in the Godhead, and declares the equality of the sexes in goodness, wisdom, and power. Genesis i. 26, 27: "And God said: let us make man in our own, image, after our own likeness.... So God created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.... And gave them dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

While woman's subordination is taught as a Scriptural doctrine, the most devout and learned biblical scholars of the present day admit that the Bible has suffered many interpolations in the course of the centuries. Some of these have doubtless occurred through efforts to render certain passages clearer, while others have been forged with direct intention to deceive. Disraeli says that the early English editions contain 6,000 errors, which were constantly introduced, and passages interpolated for sectarian purposes, or to sustain new creeds. Sometimes, indeed, they were added for the purpose of destroying all Scriptural authority by the suppression of texts. The Church Union says of the present translation, that there are more than 7,000 variations from the received Hebrew text, and more than 150,000 from the received Greek text.

These 7,000 variations in the Old Testament and 150,000 in the New Testament, are very significant facts. The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament are the Alexandrine Codex, known since the commencement of the seventeenth century, and believed to date back to the middle of the fifth century, the Sinaitic, and the Vatican Codices, each believed to have been executed about the middle of the fourth century. The Sinaitic Codex was discovered by Professor Tischendorf, a German scholar, at a monastery upon Mt. Sinai, in fragments, and at different periods from 1848 to 1859, a period of eleven years elapsing from his discovery of the first fragment until he secured the last one. The Vatican Codex has been in the Vatican library since its foundation, but it has been inaccessible to scholars until very recently. It is not known from whence it came or by whom executed, but is deemed the oldest and most authentic copy of the Bible extant. As these oldest codices only date to the middle of the fourth century, we have no record of the New Testament, in its present form, for the first three hundred and fifty years of this era.

A commission of eminent scholars has been engaged for the past eleven years upon a revision of the Bible. The New Testament portion is now about ready for the public, but so great and so many are its diversities from the old version, that it is prophesied the orthodox church will be torn by disputes between adherents of the old and the new, while those anxious for the truth, touch where it may, will be honestly in doubt if either one is to be implicitly trusted. Various comments and inquiries in regard to this revision have already appeared in the press.[226] The oldest codices do not contain many texts we have learned to look upon as especially holy. Portions of the Sermon on the Mount are not in these old manuscripts, a proof of their interpolation to serve the purpose of some one at a later date. In the same way additions have been made to the Lord's Prayer. Neither of these manuscripts contain the story of the woman taken in adultery, as narrated John viii. 1-11, so often quoted as proof of the divine mercy of Jesus. A letter upon this so long accepted story, from the eminent scholar, Howard Crosby, D.D., LL.D., a member of the revisory commission, will be read with interest:

Mrs. M. J. Gage:

Dear Madame:—The passage in John viii. 1-11, is not in the Alexandrian, nor is it in the Sinaitic, Vatican, and Ephraim Codices. It is found in twelve uncials (though marked doubtful in five of these) and in over 300 cursives.

Yours very truly,

Howard Crosby.

116 East 19th, N. Y., March 14, '81.

The world still asks, What is Truth? A work has recently been published entitled, "The Christian Religion to a.d. 200." It is the fruit of several-years' study of a period upon which the Church has but little record. It finds no evidence of the existence of the New Testament in its present form during that time; neither does it find evidence that the Gospels in their present form date from the lives of their professed authors. All Biblical scholars acknowledge that the world possesses no record or tradition of the original manuscripts of the New Testament, and that to attempt to reestablish the old text is hopeless. No reference by writers to any part of the New Testament as authoritative is found earlier than the third century (a.d. 202). The first collection, or canon, of the New Testament was prepared by the Synod or Council of Laodicea in the fourth century (a.d. 360). It entirely omitted the Book of Revelation from the list of sacred works. This book has met a similar fate from many sources, not being printed in the Syriac Testament as late as 1562.

Amid this vast discrepancy in regard to the truth of the Scriptures themselves; with no Hebrew manuscript older than the twelfth century; with no Greek one older than the fourth; with the acknowledgment by scholars of 7,000 errors in the Old Testament, and 150,000 in the New; with assurance that these interpolations and changes have been made by men in the interest of creeds, we may well believe that the portions of the Bible quoted against woman's equality are but interpolations of an unscrupulous priesthood, for the purpose of holding her in subjection to man.

Amid this conflict of authority over texts of Scripture we have been taught to believe divinely inspired, destroying our faith in doctrines heretofore declared essential to salvation, how can we be sure that the forthcoming version of the Bible from the masculine revisers of our day will be more trustworthy than those which have been accepted as of Divine origin in the past?

This chapter is condensed from the writer's forthcoming work, "Woman, Church, and State."