Compare them and decide whether it is to the Church and the Cross, with their wars and persecutions, or to Liberty and Scepticism that women owe their loyal love and their earnest support. Compare them and determine then whether it is to Christianity or to Science that she should fly for protection, and where it is that she will be most certain of justice. Compare them and answer whether it is to the Fathers of the Church or to the Founders of Republics that women should be most grateful. Compare them, and be thankful, oh women of America, that the Church never had her hand on the throat of the Constitution of the United States, and that she is losing her grip on the Supreme Bench! * In our pride of race we forget that it is less than three hundred short years since Christianity by both legal and spiritual power enforced the most degrading and vile conditions upon woman, compelling her to live solely by the sale of her virtue.** Only within the past three hundred years of growing scepticism and loss of power by the Church has either purity or dignity become possible for women; and it is well for us to remember that for over 1500 years of Christianity, when the Church had almost absolute power, it never dreamed of elevating woman, or recognizing her as other than an inferior being created solely to minister to the lowest nature of man, and possessing neither a right to her own person nor a voice in her own defence. I wish that every woman who upholds the Church to-day might read the array of facts on this subject so ably presented by Matilda Joslyn Gage in her work on "Woman, Church, and State," a digest of which is printed in the last chapter of vol. 1. of the "History of Woman Suffrage," of which she is one of the editors. It is so ably written, and the facts collected are so damning, that I need add no word of mine to such passages as I can give from it, in the accompanying appendix to this work. *** * On the status of women there is much of interest in Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Sociology," vol 1. Mr. Spencer deals with the subject, in the main, from a different point of view from the one taken in this article; but that his position (in regard to the causes of woman's advancement being due to the Church) is not wholly unlike my own, will, I think, be readily seen. He places more stress on the results of war than I have done (and in this the corroborating evidence furnished by the Holy wars would sustain the position of both), I having included this phase of action under the term occupation, since I have dealt almost wholly with nations more advanced and freer from the fortunes of the Militant type than Mr. Spencer has done. ** See Appendix D. *** See Appendix E. WOMEN AS PERSONS.