The principal support of the dogma of woman’s inferiority, and consequent submission to her husband, is found in some passages of Paul’s epistles. I shall proceed to examine those passages, premising 1st, that the antiquity of the opinions based on the false construction of those passages, has no weight with me: they are the opinions of interested judges, and I have no particular reverence for them, _merely_ because they have been regarded with veneration from generation to generation. So far from this being the case, I examine any opinions of centuries standing, with as much freedom, and investigate them with as much care, as if they were of yesterday. I was educated to think for myself, and it is a privilege I shall always claim to exercise. 2d. Notwithstanding my full belief that the apostle Paul’s testimony, respecting himself, is true, ‘I was not a whit behind the chiefest of the apostles,’ yet I believe his mind was under the influence of Jewish prejudices respecting women, just as Peter’s and the apostles were about the uncleanness of the Gentiles. ‘The Jews,’ says Clarke, ‘would not suffer a woman to read in the synagogue, although a servant, or even a child, had this permission.’ When I see Paul shaving his head for a vow, and offering sacrifices, and circumcising Timothy, to accommodate himself to the prepossessions of his countrymen, I do not conceive that I derogate in the least from his character as an inspired apostle, to suppose that he may have been imbued with the prevalent prejudices against women.