"Woman has the poison of an asp, the malice of a dragon." -St. Gregory-the-Great!

Is it suprising, with such instructions from the fathers, that the children of the Christian Church should not look up to women, and consider them men's equals?"

The following lines of Milton reflect the estimate of woman, which the teachings of Christianity had inculcated:

"Oh, why did God,

Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven
With spirits masculine create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect

Of nature, and not fill the world at once
With man, as angels, without feminine?"

It is not possible to find in "heathen lands" more revolting expressions than those indicating the estimate of woman, as held by the Christian Church, and so it is not surprising that ample proof can be adduced of the superior regard in which woman was held, by what Christian people call Heathen, or Pagan people.

Lecky, in his European Morals, says: "In the whole feudal (Christian) legislation, women were placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire. That generous public opinion, which in Pagan Rome had revolted against the injustice done to girls, totally disappeared."

Sir Henry Maine says: "No society, which preserves any tincture of Christian institutions, is ever likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the Roman law."

The cause of "Woman's Rights" was championed in Greece five.centuries before Christ.

Principal Donaldson says: "The entire exclusion of women (by Christianity) from every sacred function, stands in striking contrast with both heathen and heretical practice." Again, speaking of the respect shown to women in ancient Rome, he says: "The same respect was accorded to women by many of the heretical Christians.'

W. Matthieu Williams, F. R. A. S., F. C. S., in his narrative, Through Norway with Ladies, asks the question: "Is

it because their religion is superior to ours, that the Lapp women are better treated, and that their comparative status is higher?"

Helen H. Gardener says: "When the Pagan law recognized her (the wife) as the equal of her husband, the Church discarded that law."

Lecky says: "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 and a sense of the supreme excellence of unsullied purity which no Christian nation can surpass."

Sir Henry Maine, in his Ancient Law, says that "the inequality and oppression which related to women disappeared from Pagan laws," and adds, "The consequence was that the situation of the Roman female became one of great personal and proprietary independence; but Christianity tended somewhat, from the very first, to narrow this remarkable liberty." He further says that "the jurisconsults of the day contended for better laws for wives, but the Church prevailed in most instances, and established the most oppressive ones."

There is no more patent fact in history than that Christianity has exerted its influence in favor of inequality and injustice, with reference to woman.

Professor Draper, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, gives certain facts as to the outrageous treatment of women by Christian men (the clergy included) which it would be exceedingly indelicate in me to repeat.

Moncure D. Conway says: "There is not a more cruel chapter in history, than that which records the arrest, by Christianity, of the natural growth of European civilization regarding women."

Neander, the Church historian, says: "Christianity diminishes the influence of woman."

Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage says: "It was not until the tenth century that a Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired the right of eating at the table with him. For many

hundred years the law bound over to servile labor all unmarried women between the ages of eleven and forty."

Lord Brougham says of the common law of England (in its application to women) that "it is a disgrace to any heathen. nation."

Mrs. Livermore says: "The mediæval Church declared women unfit for instruction, and down to the Reformation the law proclaimed the wife her husband's creature and slave."

Herbert Spencer says: "Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the eleventh century, and as late as the seventeenth century, husbands of decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives. Gentlemen (!) arranged parties of pleasure for the purpose of seeing wretched women whipped at Bridewell. It was not till 1817, that the public whipping of women was abolished in England."

Where, I ask, do these Christian people get their warrant for their atrocious treatment of women, but from the Bible and from those in authority in the Church?

The late Rev. N. A. Staples, in writing to the Rev. Robert Collyer, said: "That is a real good point you make about woman's treatment in the Bible. I tell you it is a shameful book, in some of its chapters on that subject, and the time. will come when it will be so regarded."

Martin Luther, Sir Matthew Hale, Richard Baxter, Cotton Mather, John Wesley, all contributed to the heartless, fiendish persecution of women as witches (not of men as wizards) because the "Word of God" said, "Thou shalt not permit a witch to live."

Buckle says: "The severe theology of Paganism despised the wretched superstition (the belief in witchcraft.”)

Rev. Thomas C. Williams says: "I need not remind you of the moral enormities which have been defended by the supposed authority of the Bible; the burning of witches, the subjection of women," etc.

Not long ago, a firm believer in the complete subjection of women, Rev. Knox Little, said; "No crime which a husband can commit, can justify the wife's lack of obedience."

I suppose there is no nation in heathendom where there are so many wife-beaters, to-day, as in Christian England.

Not many years ago the daughter of a Christian minister to India, who had lived in India from her birth, was on a visit in New York, and meeting with a lady who had married an Englishman, inquired: "Does your husband beat you?" and on the lady replying, "No, why do you ask?" answered, "In India all Englishmen beat their wives."

In answering the question, "In what lands are women looked up to, and considered men's equals-Heathen or Christian?" I have simply given what facts I have collected relative thereto, and my authorities for those facts, and if they are found to differ from what has been supposed to exist, it is only the "truth of history" that has made them so to differ.

W1

INSPIRATION.

HAT is the foundation of the Christian religion? It is not, primarily, a belief in Christ, in God, in immortality. There is a deeper stratum than either of these upon which rests the towering structure of Christianity, and that is the belief in the inspiration, or infallibility, of the Bible; for the Christian's Christ; the Christian's God; the Christian's hope of heaven; the Christian's belief in devils and angels; in a literal hell and in all else that the Bible teaches, are predicated on the assumption that it (the Bible) is inspired by a supreme and infinite intelligence, which Christian conception has formulated as a personal God.

The question naturally arises how does, or can, anyone know anything about inspiration? What is inspiration? What is its process? Rev. J. M. Capes (of the Church of England), says: "How can any person know that he was inspired? Such knowledge would be impossible. What trait could any man possess by which he could distinguish between a fancy that arose out of his own head or supernatural information?"

No one living has had any experience of being inspired and there is no reliable evidence that anyone ever lived who was inspired, in the sense in which the word is usually understood, viz. that of a supernatural stimulus of the mental faculties. A truer view is to regard inspiration as the natural result of superior intelligence. Anyone is inspired who inspires. Inspiration is the possession of greatness, of genius. Rev. Dr.