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.
4. "The questions which presented themselves to the acuter minds of a
hundred years ago were present to the acuter minds who lived hundreds
of years before that.... But the Church had known how to deal with
intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to
Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated, and for the
most part submissive; and _if they were not_, the arm of the Church was
very long and her grasp mortal.... They [the thinkers] could have taught
Europe _earlier than the Church allowed it to learn_, that the sun does
not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the
sun.... After the middle of the last century the insurrection against
the pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity
was marked in one of its most important phases by a new, and most
significant, feature.... It was an advance both in knowledge and
in moral motive.... The philosophical movement was represented by
"Diderot" [leading the Encyclopaedist circle.]... Broadly stated the
great central moral of it was this: that human nature is good, that the
world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the
evil of the world _is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions_.
This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a
truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, _and
the beginning of a new dispensation.... Into what fresh and unwelcome
sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology... Every social
improvement since has been the outcome of that new doctrine in one form
or another_.... The teaching of the Church paints men as fallen and
depraved. The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the new fabric
rising was very natural.... The new secular knowledge clashed at
a thousand points, alike in letter and spirit, with the old sacred
lore.... A hundred years ago this perception was vague and indefinite,
but there was an unmistakable apprehension that _the Catholic ideal
of womanhood_ was no more adequate to the facts of life, than Catholic
views about science, or popery, or labor, or political order and
authority."--Morley.
And it took the rising infidels to discover the fact. See Morley,
"Diderot," p. 76.
"The greatest fact in the intellectual history of the eighteenth century
is the decisive revolution that overtook the sustaining conviction of
the Church. The central conception, that the universe was called into
existence only to further its Creator's purpose toward man, became
incredible (by the light of the new thought). What seems to careless
observers a mere metaphysical dispute was in truth, _and still is, the
decisive quarter of the great battle between theology and a philosophy
reconcilable with science_."--Morley.
"The man _who ventured to use his mind_ [Diderot] was thrown into the
dungeon at Vincennes."--Ibid.
5. "Those thinkers [Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot] taught men to
reason; reasoning well leads to acting well; justness in the mind
becomes justice in the heart. Those toilers for progress labored
usefully.... The French Revolution was their soul. It was their radiant
manifestation. It came from them; we find them everywhere in that blest
and superb catastrophe, which formed the conclusion of the past and the
opening of the future.... The new society, the desire for equality
and concession, and that beginning of fraternity which called itself
tolerance, reciprocal good-will, the just accord of men and rights,
reason recognized as the supreme law, the annihilation of prejudices and
fixed opinions, the serenity of souls, the spirit of indulgence and of
pardon, harmony, peace--behold what has come from them!"--Victor Hugo,
"Oration on Voltaire."
Appendix R.
"He [Mohammed] promulgated a mass of fables, which he pretended to
have received from heaven.... After enjoying for _twenty years_ a
power without bounds, and _of which there exists no other example_, he
announced publicly, that, if he had committed any act of injustice,
he was ready to make reparation. All were silent.... He died; and the
enthusiasm which he communicated to his people will be seen to change
the face of three-quarters of the globe.... I shall add that the
religion of Mohammed is the most simple in its dogmas, the least
absurd in its practices, above all others tolerant in its
principles."--_Condorcet_.
Appendix S.
The claim is so often and so boldly made that Infidelity produces crime,
and that Christianity, or belief, or faith, makes people good, that the
following statistics usually produce a rather chilly sensation in the
believer when presented in the midst of an argument based upon the above
mentioned claim. I have used it with effect. The person upon whom it
is used will never offer that argument to you again. The following
statistics were taken from the British Parliamentary reports, made on
the instance of Sir John Trelawney, in 1873: