insinuates an equally eminent foreign philosopher, "has been denied the gift of the ideal." "Woman," sings our own laureate, "is not the undeveloped man" (it may be presumed of the former authorities), "but his harmonious opposite; becoming" (however) "in old age more alike to him as he to her." Nay, from our pulpits the same sentiments, turned there into dogma, are pronounced. "Sex influences morals," ostensibly in favour of women, yet in reality injuriously to their best interests. One kind of immorality, the most calamitous of all, being the while so rarely alluded to in these ministrations, as to render its absence suspicious. Apparently divine truth here dare not be promulgated; or, perchance, no one can be got to listen-or, so listening, "have so much evil" that they would only draw the worse lesson from the teaching.

Besides reference to the Old Testament and the belief of the chosen people, in the image of whose Triune Jehovah man and woman (spiritually) were made, it may be noticed that the supreme deity, the oldest deity of the most ancient nations, was sexless, or united both When chaos disappeared, the governor of all things (under the supreme deity) was a woman; some of the brightest stars in the firmament were in the earliest times supposed to have a peculiar communication with women; Egyptian Isis was the equal of Osiris, and the Greek Jove was at once a youth and an immortal virgin. When male idols fell, those in female form still stood. And when Christianity came, it was but too certain that women were then to resume their just and proper place, for hence arose, apparently, much of the murmuring against it.

We ought to look upon sex as what it is—no more and no other than the passing need of the highest tribe of earth, in the animal sense; an imperfect opposition, subject to annihilation, or passing on to exist transformed elsewhere, only as all things do in their essentiality through diversity. But, granted the simultaneous creation of man and woman, granted their equality, yet it is contended, because sex was necessary in so far as the animal nature was engrafted on the human, a further and wider difference became inevitable, mental and moral as well as physical -in kind or in degree, uncertain which. The laureate says-" Woman is not undeveloped man, but different;" while the two authorities first quoted are of another opinion. Anyhow, the three unite apparently upon this, that the difference, whatever it is, is so great as to amount to a difference in kind: woman is not humanity—she is only sex, and known as such by that gallant title: a new phenomenon in creation-a preter or lower humanity-discovered in this far-searching nineteenth century. It need scarcely be explained that it is this abuse or exaggeration of the idea of sex which leads to the evil of difference in the moral law for the two portions of the race.

But, it is further argued, that some sort of difference in morality has always existed among mankind, and existed everywhere; moreover, that women have agreed to it; hence it must have been at least permitted by divine law, and have therefore worked for the best. Feeling rather than reason speaks here, and it speaks false. Evil is never thus, even indirectly, provided for; we are, on the contrary, continually to war against it. Free to do right or wrong, within limits, savage and civilised alike feel this so much within their power, that when doing evil they cheat themselves by calling it good; only when the ill deed is done, or the bad thought passed away, does the doubt arise whether either was what it previously appeared. The immorality of Pagandom was the result of lawless passion and unbridled power, fostered by manners and customs akin to them, reared by impulse and caprice rather than reflection. That of the Old Testament, in the few cases where it existed, the fruit of man's wishes, not his principles, the consequence of misinterpretation, and even infraction of the divine command. And in respect to its universal extent, this, wherever it can be traced, has existed with such wide modifications, that it cannot be relied on as an argument.

The charge, however, that women have agreed to this spurious morality, even while so decidedly against their interests, is in a certain sense so far true; they have not exactly agreed to it, but they have connived at it. Thus, through such injustice to themselves, their moral being or essence has been travestied or ignored, and an accident of it, or a phantom bearing its resemblance, set up to mislead and destroy. Nature is no stepmother to women; however ignorant and oppressed, or luxurious and overbearing, even in the worst of times, being the equals of men (to be less or unequal would be to annihilate both), not even exceptions, not even the lowest and feeblest, believed in the truth of such morality, but unhappily they feigned to do so. With the wretched results before us, it is certainly strange that we are thus late in the day called upon to subscribe to the doctrine that a human morality common to both sexes is a lie-that it, the distant reflex of divine morality, is a falsehood-that the morality is a figment which shall survive sex altogether, part of the real Us, or soul, then to exist only as higher and lower for the conflict or the balance of existence. Man can sink to the same depth and kind of degradation as his partner, while she can ascend to the like height of virtue as he can ; yet in certain cases he is apparently weak enough to be as jealous of her equality in evil as in good; let him rather strive to be innocent as a dove, and let her equally strive to be wise as a serpent; neither will go too far in their attempts !

In rude ages, as among rude people, women were more on a moral par with men, than under the empires of luxury and semi-civilisation; though, in the last case, where their condition was one of voluptuous

stagnation, men being inordinately greedy of pleasure and power, they were, after all, rather their slaves than their masters, in an immoral sense. Among the Hebrews, morality, as applied to women, was stirred, not renewed; and among our Christian selves, the stream of truth is muddled afresh by one party, while the other secretly helps them. Still, women have morally advanced, comparatively with mentheir every step forward, however, declared impossible; or, when accomplished, equally declared the farthest possible; as if our moral errors retarded, yet could not arrest, the designs of Providence in our behalf. Women are not more moral than men (though this is affected), but they are not more immoral; yet, looking only upon the surface, it seems, from the more advantageous position of men, as if the balance turned even in favour of the latter-especially by help of the fall of Eve. The Hebrews implored divine pity, because of the weaknesses of their mothers; a questionable supplication, while they arrogated divine sanction for polygamy and divorce, and banished their women to the outermost court of the sanctuary. When their women, like others, however, connived at a distinction in morality, it has ever been with the accompanying insinuation, not always perhaps clearly expressed, that they were, somehow or other, notwithstanding, the superiors here; and thus has the protest continued and been handed down. Yet, as error begets error, the idea of such superiority is a wrong one; female morality cannot be worth so much, if, even in our days, it must be guarded by childish devices, kept in awe by ogres' heads, propped by frauds, or preached to death, as it was once more forcibly fettered with irons, imprisoned within walls, and its breach painfully, sometimes even disgustingly, punished. Yet the most indolent semi-civilised or ignorant savage, not knowing or caring to know truth, in her inmost thought, never believed her moral being to be the mere complement of that of her mate, her moral duties only such as met his approval, or her moral claims, poor as they seemed, either pervertible through his, or so inextricably involved therein as to become invisible. Still less can it be verified that any Christian woman, however depressed, or even debased, ever doubted-even where forced to feign otherwise-that she was born to think and act morally for herself, as she was happy or the reverse in herself; that she was born a free moral agent, and accountable to God only-man having dominion over the brute alone. Women may be compelled, in a fashion, to agree to a false morality, or they may fraudulently subscribe to it; but their nature in the end must be true to itself, and to the divine commands laid upon it. The Saviour indirectly did away with the Jewish restrictions upon women, or by postponing their removal indicated they were only to be the more surely removed later; as slavery was to be abolished between man and his brother, so were women henceforth to partake

in that true moral freedom, a desire for which was implanted in them from the beginning. Man cannot be answerable for the moral will of woman, since he can neither think nor feel for her, more than add a moment to the sum of her days. Husbands, in a way, are chastised for their wives' faults, but finally the real punishment falls on those who in the eye of the law are little beyond lunatics or children. In vainnotwithstanding the attempt made to merge the moral nature of woman in that of man-in vain is it tried to absorb in the same manner her intellectual and physical existence; neither as matters of expediency, justice, nor right, can this be effected; it is only a seeming, a fiction, and one that has worked evilly for the race.

We are averse in this country to theory, but so curiously fast in practice, that often the deed of one day is undone the next; very conservative of this difference in the virtues of the sexes; for while other ideas around us are, whether moral or not, in motion, women are pronounced to be best off and safest, with such slow progress towards a change, as scarce to be distinguished as progress at all. Amidst this, and the like, it is not to be wondered at, though much to be deplored, that through their ignorance and indolence, acting and re-acting on each other, women connive at shirking moral responsibility, taking refuge in that popular nonentityism or do-nothingness, whose reverse as a moral activity and vital force, might bring odium upon them, if not persecution. Yet women do not deny that this want of moral courage harasses them, that moral responsibility is not thus to be avoided, and that punishment, sometime and somewhere, waits upon the evasion. It is not "what men think of us," with which we are concerned, but what the divine law requires of us, to obey which, is the only return we can make for the gift of life. Mere feminine concerns, however necessary, as exclusively belonging to the present, the initiative of existence-and this, too, only in the second place-are neither the sole objects of morality, nor the loftiest subjects for moral reflection; our highest interests are our destiny in the eternal scheme, failing to secure which, women can fulfil only a fanciful, even a false moral duty to others.

Public opinion is in favour of this difference in morality, Scripture is against it; the first, though a vacillating, is a powerful agent, yet we know which must triumph. We must return to first principles, substitute the eternal for the temporary, the essential for the accidental. We act and feel, but do not reflect on the subject; only when some monstrosity rises up to scare us, hatched from the dogma, is there any heed, worth the name, paid to its excesses.

Women form the half of the race in moral power, power not to be confounded with that indefinable attribute lent them called influence, unseen, unheard, unfelt; if not for good, they inevitably exercise that power for evil, both over themselves and men. It is a

popular saying that when a woman is good she is better, and when bad, worse than a man; though opinion is more united upon the greater evil of an immoral woman, than the greater good of a moral one. Our original mother is understood to have been the first, the chief, the ugliest, the most remorseless sinner; once, woman as the incarnation of evil, called Circe, harpy, witch-evermore still mistress of the old serpent'; now, when a representative of good, she is regarded as a nobody, an over-topping female, a mystery, or a devotee, having little in common with the practical world around her; perhaps to be set on a pedestal, with the warning to beware of "a fall," insinuated as likely to happen to her. Meanwhile, the sex at large are supposed to swallow such sentences as these-how to be digested afterwards the speakers do not concern themselves. "A few women must be humanly frail, in order that men may not worship them as angels." A late celebrated positive philosopher went further, he advised "men to worship their wives and mothers;" but, to be sure, he went mad ultimately on the subject and its relations.

It is not to be denied, however, that through inertness, ignorance, and the effects of the false condition of ages transmitted to them, women are in one sense the morally weaker, but in one sense only; actual moral secondariness in the half of the race, would involve the negation of human morality in both halves. Being such, every man looks on his wife as constituting and comprehending all women; she, as he fancies, a single, simple, innocuous creature, of no weight in public affairs, only of some value to him-and the million, in his eyes, just what she is. Strange but true-and unhappily, women, through their blind connivance in that difference of virtues taught, have lost (in the sense said before) that spiritual moral likeness in which they were created, and not yet restored through Christianity. Placing too high or too low an estimate on themselves, they have lost sight of two primary essentials of true morality-self-respect and self-reliance. Thus they are not recognised for themselves, but invested with a shadow of dignity, so far as sexual being can lend the mockery, while their morals are treated with mistaken leniency, or involuntary cruelty. Nay, according to one authority, "man tramples woman, though the object of his liveliest affections, under foot." This fact, taken in what sense we like, whether of brute force, or mental assumption, the question comes to be, why does she submit to be thus trampled on?

Of old, it was from this difference in morals, that the extraordinary notion arose of women being créated for sacrifice; now, it is granted that such sacrifice is hard, but excused by the presumption, that thus only, by loving, suffering, and obeying (the three articles of woman's creed), can they win heaven. An exceptional woman, here and there trying to follow out these articles, of course fails, and ludicrously. VOL. VI.

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