Men, Women, and Gods; and Other LecturesGardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Religion
Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures
Gardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Free thought
2. "Perhaps it is to the spirit of Puritanism that we owe the
little influence of women, and the consequent inferiority of their
education."--Buckle.
3. "In England (1840) a distrust and contempt for reason prevails
amongst religious circles to a wide extent; many Christians think it
almost a matter of duty to decry the human faculties as poor, mean,
and almost worthless; and thus seek to exalt piety at the expense of
intelligence."--Morell's "Hist. of Speculative Phil."
4. "That women are more deductive than men, because they think quicker
than men, is a proposition which some people will not relish, and yet
it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed nothing could prevent its
being universally admitted except the fact that the remarkable rapidity
with which women think is obscured by that miserable, that contemptible,
that preposterous system, called their education, in which valuable
things are carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully
taught to them, until their fine and nimble minds are too often
irretrievably injured."--Buckle.
Appendix I.
1. "The Roman [Pagan] religion was essentially domestic, and it was
a main object of the legislator to surround marriage with every
circumstance of dignity and solemnity. _Monogamy was, from the earliest
times, strictly enjoined_, and it was one of the great benefits that
have resulted from the expansion of Roman power, _that it made this type
dominant in Europe_. In the legends of early Rome we have ample evidence
both of the high moral estimate of women, and of their prominence in
Roman life. The tragedies of Lucretia and of Virginia display a delicacy
of honor, a sense of the supreme excellence of unsullied purity, which
no Christian nation could surpass."--Lecky, "European Morals," Vol. 1,
p. 316.
2. "Marriage [under Christian rule] was viewed in its coarsest and most
degraded form. The notion of its impurity took many forms, and
exercised _for some centuries_ an extremely wide influence over the
Church."--Ibid., p. 343.
Appendix J.
1. "We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have
restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual
bond-servant of her husband; no less so, as far as legal obligation
goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience
to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.
Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of
participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She
can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can
acquire no property but _for him_; the instant it becomes hers, even if
by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect the wife's
position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves
in the laws of many countries; by the _Roman_ law, for example, a slave
might have _peculium_, which, to a certain extent, the law guaranteed
him for his exclusive use."--Mill.
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