“It is worthy of note that the writers of the New Testament did not give us a ‘Thus saith the Lord’ with any of the injunctions to women, nor did our Saviour enjoin any such rules upon her. So while we admit that the words of the apostles may have been proper at the day and under the circumstances of their utterance, we claim that the condition of woman has been so changed and her mind so educated since that time that they are not applicable to her now. We are told by some that her condition thousands of years ago was her natural condition, that in which God placed her and intended her to remain. If this be so, a great wrong has been done her by taking her out of the condition of ignorance and depravity in which she then existed. An educated mind cannot be kept in slavery. Our system of education is all wrong if God intended her to remain the ignorant slave of man she then was. How comes it that, if that was her natural God-ordained position, we find her condition so different at the present day? Whether right or wrong, that condition has greatly changed ever since the introduction of Christianity. And this work, this change, is not of herself, not of man. We must recognize in her course the direction and guidance of a Higher Power. If this change, this progress, tend to evil (as its opponents predict), then He who rules and overrules is for some wise purpose of His own bringing the evil on the world. But if, as we believe, it is for the good not only of woman but of humanity then, too, we should recognize the Higher Power that so orders it and do what we may to help forward His work. In any case we cannot by opposition, Bible argument, or indifference stay His work and will. “Woman had a part to play in life that St. Paul never dreamed of, and he who lives in the next generation will see greater changes than the past has produced. As well say that men should be and do as they were and did in the days of Abraham, as to say that women should be kept in the state of bondage in which she existed thousands of years ago. The world moves and woman must move with it. She inherits the same blood, the same spirit of liberty, that descends to her brother and for which her fathers bled and died. To fight against this progression is like fighting against the emancipation of the slaves. As the chains of the latter were broken and the oppressed set free, in spite of opposition and Bible argument, so will the All-Father, in His own good time and way, bring about the emancipation of woman and make her the equal with man in power and dominion that He proclaimed her to be at the creation, that we may have— “‘everywhere Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two in the liberal offices of life.’ “A. B.”