Men, Women, and Gods Part 20

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 s.e.x 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 ma.s.ses. 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 superst.i.tion, 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 a.s.sailed 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 inst.i.tutions_.

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 ma.s.s 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:

ENGLAND AND WALES.

Criminals in England and Wales in 1873.................... 146,146

SECTARIAN AND INFIDEL POPULATION OF THE SAME.

Church of England...............................................

6,933,935

Dissenters............................................................

7,235,158

Catholics..............................................................

1,500,000

Jews....................................................................

57,000

Infidels................................................................

7,000,000

RELIGIOUS PERSUASIONS OF CRIMINALS OF THE SAME.

Church of England.............................................. 96,097

Catholics..............................................................

35,581

Dissenters............................................................

10,648

Jews...................................................................

256

Infidels................................................................

296

CRIMINALS TO 100,000 POPULATION.

Catholics..............................................................

2,500