That is the way the Church encouraged education for women. This was done, the holy Fathers said, to "protect women from the awful temptations of life to which the Lord in his infinite wisdom had subjected man." They had too much respect for their wives and mothers to permit them to come in contact with the wickedness of long division or cube root, and they hoped while life lasted that no man would be so negligent of duty as to allow his sister to soil her pure mind with conic sections. Well, in time there were a few women brave enough, and a few men honorable and moral enough, to set aside the letter of this prohibition; but much of its spirit still blossoms in all its splendor in Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and various other institutions of learning, where women are either not permitted to enter at all or are required to learn and accomplish unaided that which it takes a large faculty of instructors and every known or obtainable educational device (together with future business stimulus) to enable the young men to do the same thing! The Fathers said, in effect, "It was through woman wanting to know something that sin came into this world; therefore let her hereafter want to know nothing." They taught that a desire for knowledge on the part of woman was the greatest crime ever committed on this earth, and that it so enraged God that he punished it by death and by every curse known to man. When it was pointed out that animals had lived and _died_ on this earth long before man could have lived, they said that God knew Adam was going to live and Eve was going to sin, so he _made death retroactive_ because Adam would represent all animals when he should be created! All this was thought and done and taught in order to agree with the silly story of the "fall of man in the Garden of Eden," which every one acquainted with the simple rudiments of science or the history of the races knows to be a childish legend of an undeveloped people. Instead of a "fall" from perfect beginnings, there has been and is a constant rise in the moral as well as in the mental and physical conditions of man. The type is higher, the race nobler and nearer perfection than it ever was before; and the stories of our Bible are the same as those of all other Bibles, simply the effort of ignorant or imaginative men to account for the origin and destiny of things of which they had no accurate knowledge.*