"Were it not for this, the necessary effect of habit both in the physical and moral world, women might be expected to live in daily and hourly exultation, who have been born in a Christian and civilized country. Whatever theorists may have thought occasionally of the happiness of men in barbarous or savage conditions, no doubt at all can be entertained as to that of women. It is civilization which has taken the yoke from their neck, the scourge from their back, and the burden from their shoulders. It is Christianity chiefly which has raised them from the state of slaves or menials to that of citizens, and compelled their rough and unresisted tyrants to call up law in their defence; that potent spirit which they, who have evoked it, must ever after themselves submit to. Religion, which extends the sanctity of the marriage vow to the husband as well as to the wife, has rescued her from a condition in which her best and most tender affections were the source of her bitterest misery; a condition in which her only escape from a sense of suffering too unremitting for nature to endure, was in that mental degradation which produces insensibility to wrong. The instances of primitive communities, in which such injustice has not prevailed, are too few and far between, to form any solid objection to the truth of this general picture. The mere increase of numbers infallibly obliterates the fair but feeble virtues that originate in nothing but ignorance of ill; and the first inroads of want or discord, usually settle the doom of the weak and defenceless. In restoring to women their domestic dignity, religion has done more than every other cause towards shielding them from the consequences of weakness and dependence. From the dignified affections of the other sex, they have gradually acquired some social rights, and some share of that freedom, without which virtue itself can scarcely exist. Opinion, the offspring, not of resplendent genius, whose earliest fires burned indignantly against the tyrant and oppressor, but of a religion which preached the equality of all before God, has given them a share of those blessings, without which life is not worth possession. At length it has opened to them the portals of knowledge and wisdom, the gradual, but effective supports against degradation; and has sanctified its gifts by withholding from them every license that leads to vice, every knowledge that detracts from their purity, and every profession that would expose them to insult."