the Bible Trinity of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" beside the Homeric trinity, "Father, Mother and Child," and prove that the Bible has elevated woman. The Homeric conception of woman towers like the Norway pine above the noxious growth of the Mosaic ideal. Compare the men and the women of the Bible with the stately figures culled from the temple of Pagan antiquity. Zipporah denouncing Moses as a "bloody husband," Abraham sending Hagar and his child into the desert and pocketing twice over the gains from his wife's prostitution; Lot and his daughters; Judah and his daughter-in-law, Onan; Yamar, the Levite, and his concubine; David and Bath-sheba; Solomon in the sewer of sensualism; Rahab, Aholibah, Mary of Bethlehem, and Mary Magdala.
Place these by the side of the man and the woman, Hector and Andromache, of the "Iliad," who called upon the immortal gods to bless their child of love; the virgin Isis with her son Horus; the Vedic virgin Indrance, the mother of the savior-god, Indra; Devaki and her Divine child, Chrishna; Hipparchia, Pandora, Protogenia, Cornelia, Plotina, and a host of the noble and virtuous of Pagan history. Prove by comparing these with the position of woman in Christendom that woman owes all that she is to the Bible.
Compare Ruth of the Bible with the magnificent Pagan, Penelope, who refused the hands of kings, was as true to her love as the star is to the pole, who, after years of waiting, clasped the old wanderer in rags to her heart, her husband, her long-lost Ulysses; yet this Pagan woman lived ten centuries before the laws of Moses and of Christ were promulgated. While there are millions of Penelopes in Christendom, there are other millions of women, after centuries of Bible teaching, who lie outside the pale of motherhood, and even outside of the pale of swine-hood. Under Bible teaching the scarlet woman is "anathema, marantha," while the scarlet man holds high place in the Sanctuary and the State.
The by-paths of ecclesiastical history are fetid with the records of crimes against women; and "the half has never been told." And what of the history which Christianity is making to-day? Answer, ye victims of domestic warfare who crowd the divorce courts of Bible lands. Answer, ye wretched offspring of involuntary motherhood. Answer, ye five hundred thousand outcast women of Christian America, who should have been five hundred thousand blessings, bearing humanity in your unvitiated blood down the streams of time. Answer, ye mental dwarfs and moral monstrosities, and tell what the Holy Bible has done for you.
While these answers echo through the stately cathedrals of Bible lands, if the priest, with the Holy Bible in his hands, can show just cause why woman should not look to reason and to science rather than to Scripture for deliverance, "let him speak now, or forever after hold his peace."
When Reason reigns and Science lights the way, a countless host of women will move in majesty down the coming centuries. A voice will cry, "Who are these?" and the answer will ring out: "These are the mothers of the coming race, who have locked the door of the Temple of Faith and thrown the key away; 'these are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the' fountain of knowledge."
Josephine K. Henry.
My Dear Mrs. Stanton:—To say that "the Bible for two thousand years has been the greatest block in the way of civilization" is, misleading. Until the Protestant reformation, the Bible was hidden from the common people by the hierarchs of the Roman Catholic Church; and it is only about three centuries that it has been read in the vernacular.
I cannot agree with you that "the Bible degrades women from Genesis to Revelation." The Bible, which is a collection of ancient literature, historic, prophetic, poetic and epistolary, is valuable as showing the status of woman at the time when the books were written. And the advice, or the commands, to women given by Paul in the Epistles, against which there has been so much railing, when studied in the light of the higher criticism, with the aid of cotemporary history and Greek scholarship, show Paul to have been in advance of the religious teachers of his time.
All these commands that have offended us in the past appear in his Epistles to the churches in cities of Greece, where marriage was bitter slavery to women. Paul was aiming to uplift marriage to the level of the great Christian idea, as he uttered it, in Gal. iii., 28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Christianity is simply the universal fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of man. And Paul was declaring this in the utterance which I have quoted. All the unjust distinctions of race and of caste, all the oppressions of slavery and the degradations of woman were effaced by the two cardinal doctrines of pristine Christianity; and Paul seems to have lived up to his teaching.
I cannot say that "Christianity has been the foe of woman." The study of the evolution of woman does not show this. My later studies have changed many of my earlier crude notions concerning the development of woman. She has developed slowly, and so has man; and the history of the past shows that every activity of man which has advanced him has been shared by her.
There is so wide a belief among orthodox people, nowadays, in what Professor Briggs calls "the errancy of the Bible," that I doubt if you will be attacked, no matter how startling may be your heresies in Part II. Nobody cares much about heresy in these days; and my desire to withhold my name from your work, as an endorser, comes from my utter ignorance of it, and from my belief that I should disagree with you, judging from your letter before me.
Yours very truly,
M. A. Livermore.
My Dear Mrs. Stanton:—You have sent to me the following questions: "Have the teachings of the Bible advanced or retarded the emancipation of women? Have they dignified or degraded the Mothers of the Race?"
In reply I would say, that as a matter of fact, the nations which treat women with the most consideration are all Christian nations; the countries in which women have open to them all the opportunities for education which men possess are Christian countries; coeducation originated in Christian colleges; the professions and the trades are closed to us in all except Christian lands; and woman's ballot is unknown except where the Gospel of Christ has mellowed the hearts of men until they became willing to do women justice. Wherever we find an institution for the care and the comfort of the defective or the dependent classes, that institution was founded by men and women who were Christians by heredity and by training.
No such woman as Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with her heart aflame against all forms of injustice and of cruelty, with her intellect illumed and her tongue quickened into eloquence, has ever been produced in a country where the Bible was not incorporated into the thoughts and the affections of the people and had not been so during many generations.
I think that men have read their own selfish theories into the Book, that theologians have not in the past sufficiently recognized the progressive quality of its revelation, nor adequately discriminated between its records as history and its principles of ethics and of religion, nor have they until recently perceived that it is not in any sense a scientific treatise; but I believe that the Bible comes to us from God, and that it is a sufficient rule of faith and of practice. I believe that it is no accident which has placed this Book at the parting of the ways between a good life and a bad one, and enshrined it at the centre of the holiest scenes which the heart can know, placing it in the pastor's hand at the wedding and at the grave, on the father's knee at family prayer, in the trembling fingers of the sick, and at the pillow of the dying, making it the hope of the penitent and the power of God unto salvation of those who sin.
To me the Bible is the dear and sacred home book which makes a hallowed motherhood possible because it raises woman up, and with her lifts toward heaven the world. This is the faith taught to me by those whom I have most revered and cherished; it has produced the finest characters which I have ever known; by it I propose to live; and holding to the truth which it brings to us, I expect to pass from this world to one even more full of beauty and of hope.
Believe me, honored co-worker for the enfranchisement of women,
Yours with sisterly regard,
Frances E. Willard.
Among the letters in reply to the interrogatories propounded are two, noticeable because they are in such a striking contrast to that of Mrs. Josephine K. Henry, which immediately precedes them. Their first marked characteristic is their total lack