Chapter 13

3. "It will hardly be believed that, when sulphuric ether was first used to lessen the pains of childbirth, it was objected to as 'a profane attempt to abrogate the primeval curse pronounced upon woman....' The injury which the theological principle has done to the world is immense. It has prevented men from studying the laws of nature."--Buckle.

Appendix G.

1. "The narrow range of their sympathies [the clergy's], and the intellectual servitude they have accepted, render them _peculiarly unfitted_ for the office of educating the young, which they so persistently claim, and which, _to the great misfortune of the world_, they were long permitted to monopolize.... The almost complete omission from female education of those studies which most discipline and strengthen the intellect, increases the difference, while at the same time it has been usually made a main object to imbue them with a passionate faith in traditional opinions, and to preserve them from all contact with opposing views. But contracted knowledge and imperfect sympathy are not the sole fruits of this education. It has always been the peculiarity of a certain kind of theological teaching, that it -inverts all the normal principles of judgment and absolutely destroys intellectual diffidence. On other subjects we find if not a respect for honest conviction, at least some sense of the amount of knowledge that is requisite to entitle men to express an opinion on grave controversies. A complete ignorance of the subject-matter of a dispute restrains the confidence of dogmatism; and an ignorant person who is aware that, by much reading and thinking in spheres of which he has himself no knowledge, his educated neighbor has modified or rejected opinions which that ignorant person had been taught, will, at least if he is a man of sense or modesty, abstain from compassionating the benighted condition of his more instructed friend. But on theological questions this has never been so.

"Unfaltering belief being taught as the first of duties, and all doubt being usually stigmatized as criminal or damnable, a state of mind is formed to which we find no parallel in other fields. Many men and most women, though completely ignorant of the very rudiments of biblical criticism, historical research, or scientific discoveries, though they have never read a single page, or Understood a single proposition of the writings of those whom they condemn, and have absolutely no rational knowledge either of the arguments by which their faith is defended, or of those by which it has been impugned, will nevertheless adjudicate with the utmost confidence upon every polemical question, denounce, hate, pity, or pray for the conversion of all who dissent from what they have been taught, assume, as a matter beyond the faintest possibility of doubt, that the opinions they have received without inquiry must be true, and that the opinions which others have arrived at by inquiry must be false, and make it a main object of their lives to assail what they call heresy in every way in their power, except by examining the grounds on which it rests. It is possible that the great majority of voices that swell the clamor against every book which is regarded as heretical, are the voices of those who would deem it criminal even to open that book, or to enter into any real, searching, and impartial investigation of the subject to which it relates. Innumerable pulpits support this tone of thought, and represent, with a fervid rhetoric _well fitted to excite the nerves and imaginations of women_, the deplorable condition of all who deviate from a certain type of opinions or emotions; a blind propagandism or a secret wretchedness penetrates into countless households, poisoning the peace of families, chilling the mental confidence of husband and wife, _adding immeasurably to the difficulties which every searcher into truth has to encounter, and diffusing far and wide intellectual timidity, disingenuousness, and hypocrisy_."--Lecky.

2. "The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived."--Buckle.

3. "In the fourth century there arose monachism, and in, the sixth century the Christians succeeded in cutting off the last ray of knowledge, and shutting up the schools of Greece. Then followed a long period of theology, ignorance, and vice."--Puckle.

4. "Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was ever odious to it, and was ever regarded with a suspicious eye, as being a _dangerous enemy to the success of miracles_; and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to follow some physical absurdities. _The triumph of Christianity was thus the final signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of philosophy_."--"Progress of the Human Mind," _Condorcet_.

"Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity, _though unable in the sequel to prevent their reappearance in splendor after the invention of printing_, was at this period sufficiently powerful to accomplish their ruin."--Ibid.

"In the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall see the human mind _rapidly descending from the height to which it had raised itself_... Everywhere was corruption, cruelty, and perfidy.... Theological reveries, superstitions, delusions, are become the sole genius of man, religious _intolerance his only morality_; and Europe, crushed between sacerdotal tyranny and military despotism, awaits in blood and in tears the moment when the _revival of light shall restore it to liberty, to humanity, and to virtue_.... The priests held human learning in contempt.... Fanatic armies laid waste the provinces. Executioners, _under the guidance of legates and priests_, put to death those whom the soldiers had spared. _A tribunal of monks was established, with power of condemning to the stake whoever should be suspected of making use of his reason_.... All sects, all governments, every species of authority, inimical as they were to each other in every point else, seemed to be of accord in granting no quarter to the exercise of reason.... Meanwhile education, being everywhere subjected [to the clergy], had corrupted everywhere the general understanding, by _clogging the reason of children with the weight of the religious prejudices of their country_... In the eighth century an ignorant pope had persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round, in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable, delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, _accused of having proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth_. The greatest genius that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and infirmities, was obliged to purchase his release from punishment and from prison, by asking pardon of God for having taught men better to understand his works."--Ibid.

Appendix H.

1. Fenelon, a celebrated French clergyman and writer of the seventeenth century, discouraged the acquisition of knowledge by women.--See Hallam's "Lit. of Europe."

2. "Perhaps it is to the spirit of Puritanism that we owe the little influence of women, and the consequent inferiority of their education."--Buckle.

3. "In England (1840) a distrust and contempt for reason prevails amongst religious circles to a wide extent; many Christians think it almost a matter of duty to decry the human faculties as poor, mean, and almost worthless; and thus seek to exalt piety at the expense of intelligence."--Morell's "Hist. of Speculative Phil."

4. "That women are more deductive than men, because they think quicker than men, is a proposition which some people will not relish, and yet it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed nothing could prevent its being universally admitted except the fact that the remarkable rapidity with which women think is obscured by that miserable, that contemptible, that preposterous system, called their education, in which valuable things are carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully taught to them, until their fine and nimble minds are too often irretrievably injured."--Buckle.

Appendix I.

1. "The Roman [Pagan] religion was essentially domestic, and it was a main object of the legislator to surround marriage with every circumstance of dignity and solemnity. _Monogamy was, from the earliest times, strictly enjoined_, and it was one of the great benefits that have resulted from the expansion of Roman power, _that it made this type dominant in Europe_. In the legends of early Rome we have ample evidence both of the high moral estimate of women, and of their prominence in Roman life. The tragedies of Lucretia and of Virginia display a delicacy of honor, a sense of the supreme excellence of unsullied purity, which no Christian nation could surpass."--Lecky, "European Morals," Vol. 1, p. 316.

2. "Marriage [under Christian rule] was viewed in its coarsest and most degraded form. The notion of its impurity took many forms, and exercised _for some centuries_ an extremely wide influence over the Church."--Ibid., p. 343.

Appendix J.

1. "We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband; no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law. Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but _for him_; the instant it becomes hers, even if by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many countries; by the _Roman_ law, for example, a slave might have _peculium_, which, to a certain extent, the law guaranteed him for his exclusive use."--Mill.

2. Speaking of self-worship which leads to brutality toward others, Mill says: "Christianity will never practically teach it" (the equality of human beings) "while it sanctions institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference for one human being over another."

"The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice." --Ibid.

"Institutions, books, education, society all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming."--Ibid.

"There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who tried... to convert us into a sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting all improvement; and great has been their power, and many have had to sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted, _and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what we are to be_."--Ibid.

Appendix K

"In this tendency [to depreciate extremely the character and position of women] we may detect in part the influence of the earlier Jewish writings, in which it is probable that most impartial observers will detect evident traces of the common oriental depreciation of women. The custom of money-purchase to the father of the bride was admitted. Polygamy was authorized, and practised by the wisest men on an enormous scale. A woman was regarded as the origin of human ills. A period of purification was appointed after the birth of every child; but, _by a very significant provision, it was twice as long in the case of a female as of a male child_ (Levit. xii. 1-5). _The badness of men_, a Jewish writer emphatically declared, _is better than the goodness of women_ (Ecclesiasticus xlii. 14). The types of female excellence exhibited in the early period of Jewish history are in general _of a low order, and certainly far inferior_ to those of Roman history or Greek poetry; and _the warmest eulogy of a woman in the Old Testament is probably that which was bestowed upon her who, with circumstances of the most exaggerated treachery, had murdered the sleeping fugitive who had taken refuge under her roof,_"--Lecky, "European Morals," vol 1, p. 357.

Appendix L.

1. "Mr. F. Newman, who looks on toleration as the result of intellectual progress, says: 'Nevertheless, not only does the Old Testament justify bloody persecution, but the New teaches that God will visit men with fiery vengeance _for holding an erroneous creed_."--Buckle.

2. "The first great consequence of the decline of priestly influence was the rise of toleration.... I suspect that the _impolicy_ of persecution was perceived before its wickedness. "--Ibid.

3. "While a multitude of scientific discoveries, critical and historical researches, and educational reforms have brought thinking men face to face with religious problems of extreme importance, _women have been almost absolutely excluded from their influence_."--Lechy.

4. "The domestic unhappiness arising from difference of belief was probably almost or altogether unknown in the world before the introduction of Christianity.... _The deep, and widening chasm between the religious opinions of most highly educated men, and of the immense majority of women is painfully apparent_. Whenever any strong religious fervor fell upon a husband or a wife, its first effect was to make a happy union impossible."--Ibid.

5. "The combined influence of the Jewish writings [Old Testament] and of that ascetic feeling which treated woman as the chief source of temptation to man, caused her degradation.... In the writings of the Fathers, woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual penance, _on account of the curse she has brought into the world_. She should be ashamed of her dress, _and especially ashamed of her beauty_."--Ibid.

Appendix M.

1. "The writers of the Middle Ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels.... The inveterate prevalence of incest among the clergy rendered it necessary again and again to issue the most stringent enactments that priests should not be permitted to live with their _mothers or sisters_.... An Italian bishop of the tenth century enigmatically described the morals of his time, when he declared, that if he were to enforce the canons against unchaste people administering ecclesiastical rites, no one would be left in the Church except the boys."--Lecky.

2. In the middle of the sixteenth century ''the majority of the clergy were nearly illiterate, and many of them addicted to drunkenness and low vices.--Hallam, "Const. Hist, of Eng."

3. "The clergy have ruined Italy."--Brougham, "Pol. Phil."

4. "It was a significant prudence of many of the lay Catholics, who were accustomed to insist that their priests should take a concubine _for the protection of the families of the parishioners_.... It can hardly be questioned that the extreme frequency of illicit connections among the clergy _tended during many centuries most actively to lower the moral tone of the laity_.... An impure chastity was fostered, which continually looked upon marriage in its coarsest light.... Another injurious consequence, resulting, in a great measure, from asceticism, was a tendency to depreciate extremely the character and the position of woman."--Lecky.

Appendix N.

1. "The great and main duty which a wife, as a wife, ought to learn, and so learn as to practise it, is to be subject to her own husband.... There is not any husband to whom this honor of submission is not due; no personal infirmity, frowardness of nature; no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of it."--Fergusson on "the Epistles."

2. "The sum of a wife's duty unto her husband is subjection. "--Abernethy.

3. "We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of obedience [upon wives]; as every established fact _which is too bad to admit of any other defense, is always presented to us as an injunction of religion. The Church, it is true, enjoins it in her formularies_."--Mill.

"The principle of the modern movement in morals and in politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, _merit and not birth is the only rightful claim to power and authority_."--Ibid.

"Taking the care of people's lives out of their own hands, and relieving them from the consequences of their own acts, _saps the very foundation_ of the self-respect and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue."--Ibid.

"Inferior classes of men always, at heart, feel disrespect toward those who are subject to their power."--Ibid.

4. "Among those causes of human improvement that are of most importance to the general welfare, must be included the total annihilation of the prejudices which have established between the sexes an inequality of right, _fatal even to the party which it favors_. In vain might we seek for motives to justify the principle, in difference of physical organization, of intellect, or of moral sensibility. It had at first no other origin but abuse of strength, _and all the attempts which have since been made to support it_ are idle sophisms."--"Progress of the Human Mind," _Condorcet_.

5. Notwithstanding the work of such men as the Encyclopedists of France and other liberal thinkers for the proper recognition of women, the Church had held her grip so tight that upon the passage of the bill, as late as 1848, giving to married women the right to own their own property, the most doleful prophesies went up as to the just retribution that would fall upon women for their wicked insubordination, and upon the men who had defied divine commands so far as to pass such a law. A recent writer tells us that Wm. A. Stokes, in talking to a lady whom he blamed for its passage, said: "We hold you responsible for that law, and I tell you now you will live to rue the day when you opened such a Pandora's box in your native State, and cast such an apple of discord into every family of the State."

And the sermons that were preached against it--the prophecies of deacon and preacher--were so numerous, so denunciatory, and so violent that they form a queer and interesting chapter in the history of the attitude of the Church toward women, and illustrate, in our own time, how persistent it has been in its efforts to prevent woman from sharing in the benefits of the higher civilization of the nineteenth century.

But fortunately for women, Infidels are more numerous than they ever were before, and the power of the Church is dying of dry rot, or as Col. Ingersoll wittily says, of the combined influence of softening of the brain and ossification of the heart.

Appendix O.

"St. Gregory the Great describes the virtue of a priest, _who through motives of piety had discarded his wife_... Their wives, in _immense numbers_, were driven forth with hatred and with scorn... Pope Urban II. _gave license_ to the nobles _to reduce to slavery the wives_ of priests who refused to abandon them."--Lecky.

Appendix P.

1. "Hallam denies that respect for women is due to Christianity. "--Buckle.

2. "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."--Ibid.

"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 law is still preserved."--Borrow.

3. "Contempt for woman, _the result of clerical teaching_, is shown in myriad forms."--Gage.

4. "The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, _and is now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement_."--John Stuart Mill.

5. "I have no relish for a community of goods resting on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours, but what is yours is not mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact with anyone, _though I were myself_ the person to profit by it."--Ibid.

It will take a long time for that sort of morality to filter into the skull of the Church, and when it does the skull will burst.

6. "Certain beliefs have been inculcated, certain crimes invented, in order to intimidate the masses. Hence the Church made free thought the worst of sins, and the spirit of inquiry the worst of blasphemies.... As late as the time of Bunyan the chief doctrine inculcated from the pulpit was obedience to the temporal power.... All these influences fell with crushing weight on woman."--_Matilda Joslyn Gage_ in "Hist. Woman Suffrage."

7. "Taught that education for her was indelicate and irreligious, she has been kept in such gross ignorance as to fall a prey to superstition, and to glory in her own degradation... Such was the prejudice against a liberal education for woman, that the first public examination of a girl in geometry (1829) created as bitter a storm of ridicule as has since assailed women who have entered the law, the pulpit, or the medical profession."--Ibid.

Appendix Q.

1. "The five writers to whose genius we owe the first attempt at comprehensive views of history were Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. Of these the second was but a cold believer in Christianity, if, indeed, he believed in it at all; and the other four were avowed and notorious infidels."--Buckle.

2 "Here, then, we have the starting-point of progress--_scepticism_.... All, therefore, that men want is _no hindrance_ from their political and religious rulers.... Until common minds doubt respecting religion they can never receive any new scientific conclusion at variance with it--as Joshua and Copernicus."--Ibid.

3. "The immortal work of Gibbon, of which the sagacity is, if possible, equal to the learning, did find readers, but the illustrious author was so cruelly reviled by men who called themselves Christians, that it seemed doubtful if, after such an example, subsequent writers would hazard their comfort and happiness by attempting to write philosophic history. Middleton wrote in 1750.... As long as the theological spirit was alive nothing could be effected."--Ibid.