If she had no male relations, the injury did not count, and no "person" being injured everything was lovely, and prayers went right on to the God who, being no respecter of persons (provided they were free, white, adult males), enjoyed the incense from altars whereon burning "witches" writhed in agony and helpless young girls plead for mercy under the loathed and loathsome touch of the "St." Augustines* and "St." Pelayos,** whose praises are chanted and whose divine goodness is recounted by Christendom to-day. * "To Augustine, whose early life was spent in company with the most degraded of womankind, is Christianity indebted for the full development of the doctrine of Original sin." --Gage. "All or at least the greater part of the fathers of the Greek Church before Augustine, denied any real original sin."--Emerson. "The doctrine had a gradual growth, and was fully developed by Augustine." --Waite. ** "The abbot elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, in 1171, was found on investigation to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village. An abbot of St. Pelayo in Spain, in 1180, was proved to have kept no less than seventy mistresses. Henry III, Bishop of Liege, was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children." --Leeky, "Hist, of European Morals." "This same bishop boasted, at a public banquet, that in twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. A license to the clergy to keep concubines was during several centuries levied by princes."--Ibid. "It was openly attested that 100,000 women in England alone were made dissolute by the clergy." --Draper, "Intellectual Development of Europe." Such was the "_elevation" and civilization offered by the Church to woman_. These are among her debts to the Church, and the men who fought and contended against the incorporation of such infamy into the common law were branded as infidels. It was said they denied their Lord. They were pronounced most dangerous, and the clergy held up their hands in holy horror and whispered that such men "as much as denied the Bible, blasphemed their God, and sold their souls to the Devil." And the women, poor dupes, believed it. One method the Church took to benefit woman and show its respect for her was this: any married man was prohibited from being a priest. Women were so unholy, so unclean, and so inferior, that to have one as a wife degraded a man to such an extent that he was unfit to be a minister or to touch holy things. The Catholic Church still prohibits either party who is so unholy as to marry from profaning its pulpit'; but the Protestant Churches divide up, giving women the disabilities and mon the offices. The unselfishness of such a course is quite touching. It says to women: "You support us and we will damn you; there is nothing mean or niggardly about us."