I take again these two grand principles, these two great acts of Jesus,--the abolition of every privilege in the relations of God and man, and the distinction of man's religious and his civil life: I confront with these two principles all the history, and every state of society previous to the advent of Jesus Christ, and I am unable to discover in those essentially Christian principles any kindred, any human origin. Everywhere before Christ, religions were national local religions; they were religions which established between nations, classes, individuals, enormous differences and inequalities. {280} Everywhere, also, before Christ, man's civil life and his religious life were confounded, and mutually oppressed each other; that religion or those religions were institutions incorporated in the state, which the state regulated or repressed as its interest dictated. But in this catholicity of religious faith, in this independence of religious communities, I am constrained to recognise new and sublime principles, and to see in them flashes from the light of heaven. It needed many centuries before mental vision was capable of receiving that light; and no one shall pronounce how many centuries will be needed before it will pervade and penetrate the entire world. But whatever difficulties and shortcomings may be reserved in the womb of the future for the two great truths to which I have just referred, it is clear that God caused them first to beam forth from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. {281} V. Jesus And Women. At the very source of all religions, as well as in their subsequent history, women find a place to fill and a part to perform. At one time they constitute the material and furnish the ornament of licentious systems of mythology. At another, on the contrary, they are, for the heroes of those religions, objects either of pious horror or of observances at once rigorous and austere: women are considered by them as creatures full of evil and of peril; and they are accordingly thrust from their lives as men thrust from them what is a temptation and an impurity. Voluptuous pictures and adventures on the one hand, and zealous impulses of rigid asceticism on the other, constitute the two extremes to which religions in their ages of youth and of vigour are alternately prone. {282} Sometimes--and it is more fortunate for women when it is the case--they are described in the narrative of these religions, such as they really are in human life, charmers and at the same time charmed, seducers and seduced, idols and slaves; at first votaries of the enthusiasm, the victims of the errors and the passions which they at once inspire and feel. Whether Asiatic or European, rude or refined, such are the striking features with which all systems of religion, excepting Christianity, have characterised the women whom they have introduced in their narratives.