I presume that Adam knew nothing of the subject of woman's inferiority.
I do not think that he ever said to Eve, Don't soar so high nor dive so
deep into philosophy, science and religion, because you are a woman. I
don't think he ever said to his wife, Astronomy is beyond your reach,
nor Science is too deep for your slender powers.
Home is a woman's empire, but this very fact demands that her
intellectual powers should not be inferior to her husband's. A vast
majority of people have their minds influenced and their characters
formed by their mothers. Foolish and silly, as well as lazy women
generally, have their counterparts in their offspring. By following the
outlines of nature in her facts we have become scientific, and all the
wisdom we can get from this source will be still more advantageous. The
woman's physical nature should ever teach us that she is not to be taxed
with physical labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such
taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always _destroys
home_. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy,
good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be,
does all the drudgery. For this _very reason_ he was never elevated, as
a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound dog, and never had a home
superior to Doolittle's birth-place, which, he said, was "at Cape Cod,
Nantucket, and all along up and down the shore."
It is said that the English is the only language in which the word
"home" occurs. What infamous hours many bachelors keep; many of them die
of dissipation because they have no mother, sister, or wife to look
after them and render their homes pleasant and attractive. What an odd
looking thing a house is without a female occupant. "Won't you tarry
awhile?" "Can't you stay awhile?" "O, don't be in a hurry." Such is
often heard, and the reply is, "No, I am much obliged to you, I must go,
for my mother, my sister, or my wife, is expecting me." But for these
sentiments he would stay until midnight; so some unmarried men are the
most contemptible _bores_. When you get acquainted with them you
naturally hate to see them coming. Some married men fall into the same
way of _boring_ their neighbors. When I see a man doing this I suspect
that he has lost his love of home associations, and ask myself the
question, What is the trouble?
There is always an adequate cause for every effect. Modern "Freeloveism"
looks to the annihilation of home, for the reason that it proposes no
definite home for male or female. No people destitute of the light of
the Bible ever possessed a home, such an one as ours.
One of the great abominations of infidelity is often met within the
advocacy of _Freeloveism_, and matrimony binding at the option, simply,
of the parties. What is a vagabond on the earth but a man without a
home? Slaves have been the same in every age, and a government that does
everything for its subjects will always keep them in degradation. A
father and mother who would not effectually ruin their children must not
raise them in indolence and affluence, doing everything for them and
teaching them nothing in a practical way; even so a woman must be
elevated until her post is one of honor. You might as well tie a man
hand and foot, and command him to run a race, as to deprive women or
others of their natural rights, and then expect them to rise or progress
the same as those who are in the full possession of all their liberties.
Give to all freedom and scope for their talents, and allow them to rise
or fall at pleasure, but ever point them upward and onward.
Women were slaves in Egypt, in Babylon, in Ninevah, in Persia, in Greece
and Rome, and all those nations _sunk_. She is now a slave in China, in
India and in Turkey.
Adam said: "She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be
called woman for she was taken from man. Therefore shall a man leave his
father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be
one flesh."
Say what you will of gallantry, and of the flattery of the sex, but here
you have the intelligent and affectionate language of the first man,
which, for beauty and love, as well as simplicity, has never been
surpassed. "She is bone of my bone," and consequently of my own rank. We
are one. She is flesh of my flesh and therefore is my equal. "She shall
be called woman," that is, a female man.
It is authoritatively asserted that the Hebrew term translated woman
signifies a female man, just as in Latin "equa" is the feminine of
"equus," "Julia" is the feminine of "Julius." But if she was a female
man she possessed all the attributes of humanity, and therefore her
dignity was and is the same as the other sex. Adam gave to Eve a
position, an honorable position, for he took her in as a part of
himself. His honor was her honor, his rank was her rank, and she was his
helpmeet. My ideal woman is not one who is good for nothing, "bred only
and polished to the taste of lustful appetence; to sing, to dance, to
dress, to troll the tongue and roll the eye." She should be a helpmeet
as termed in the Bible. She should be a creature not too bright and good
to labor in her proper sphere, that is, to prepare daily food, serve it
up and guide the house. A high legal dignitary placed an epitaph upon
the tomb of his wife, that read: "An excellent woman and a good cook."
When a stout, able-bodied woman sits herself down and whines out, "I
can't work," she gets down very low. What is such a woman good for?
It has been said that woman is man's imaginative side. Well, I imagine
that there is a great deal of truth in the remark so far as many men are
concerned, and this simple fact has ruined many a wife. A woman may
operate very well upon a man's imagination, but that will never help him
to make a living.
Let woman be, to all intents and purposes, the equal of man, trained for
the work of every-day life, for this is what the word education means.
Then throw open to her all the employments lying within her strength,
which are now monopolized by men, and let this new advantage work a
reformation in her education. What is her education even now, and in our
own country? Instead of being educated for health and long life, they
are trained in many instances for disease and a premature death. The
history of woman, as woman, is not in our reach; at least I am not
prepared to say it has been written. I wish it had, for I am persuaded
that woman has been the great redeeming element upon the human side of
bliss, without which our world could not exist.
* * * * *
"And they charge that he (Thomas Paine) was a drunkard. That is another
falsehood. He drank liquor in his day, as did the preachers. It was no
unusual thing for the preacher going home to stop in a tavern and take a
drink of hot rum with a deacon, and it was no unusual thing for the
deacon to help the preacher home."--_Ingersoll._
Therefore, if a man stops at a hotel and drinks till he has to be helped
home, he is no drunkard? No! Ingersoll is a temperance man (?) and he
knows.
THE TESTIMONY OF AN INFIDEL IN WHOSE HEART EVERY SPARK OF TRUTH AND
JUSTICE WAS NOT EXTINGUISHED.
J.J. Rousseau says: The gospel, that divine book, the only one necessary
to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be
one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of
its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. Virtue never spoke in
gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater
energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of
it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the
philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with
this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction?
This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which
nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ; and,
after all, this is but shifting the difficulty, not answering it. The
supposition that several persons had united to fabricate this book, is
more inconceivable than that one person should have supplied the subject
of it. The spirit which it breathes, the morality which it inculcates,
could never have been the invention of Jewish authors, and the gospel
possesses characters of truth so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that
the inventor would be a more astonishing object than the hero.--_J.J.
Rousseau, vol. 36, pp. 36, 39._
* * * * *
Have infidels been martyred on account of their infidelity? Men are not
so foolish as to have themselves devoured by wild beasts or perish in
slow fires rather than recant from a theory they never espoused, Col.
Ingersoll to the contrary, _notwithstanding_. Men do not prefer red-hot
iron chains to denying a Lord in whom they never believed. Infidels have
nothing to lose by recanting. Colonel Ingersoll says, "I think I would.
There is not much of the martyr about me," _so we think of the Colonel_!