The Fathers of the Church were as a rule a bad lot themselves. All contemporaneous history and all internal evidence prove this fact: and when we remember that the "Prophets" were almost to a man polygamists; that their belief and practices in this regard were of the order and type of Mormondom to-day, _and for the same reasons_; that they were slave-holders and slave-stealers; that they believed in a God of infinite cruelty and revenge--of arbitrary will and reasonless barbarity; and that they were licentious and brutal beyond description; it will be easy to understand the position which such men--with these beliefs, practices, mentality, and moral degradation--would accord to women. Every Bible of every people; every history of every race showing like civilization, will show you like results.* *See Appendix M. In the New Testament we find an effort to readjust old clothes to a new body, some of whose members had grown better and some worse in dogma and belief. Where women are _especially_ dealt with we find them commanded to "be under obedience," and always to subject their wills to the ways and wills of men; while the general tone and treatment are always based upon the assumption that she is an inferior, a secondary creation, and a subject class.* That this is the understanding of the Bible always recognized by the Church (and to-day questioned by only a very small minority who are shrewd enough to see the necessity of revamping it to fit the new public morality and civilization), all history attests; but the vehemence with which the doctrine has been asserted the foregoing pages can only faintly indicate. ** But certainly, if for thousands of years the clergy have, as a body, misconstrued or misunderstood the spirit of their own book (to which they have always claimed to possess the only key), they should not blame those who to-day take issue with them upon their information, their dictates, their _basis of morality_, or their interpretations of the rights of humanity. If, as they claim to-day, the Bible is the friend of women and no respecter of persons, a conclusion which it took them hundreds of years to reach, it has taken them too long to discover the fact for their guidance to be either a desirable or a safe one for humanity; and the millions of women they have degraded and oppressed in the past are certainly not an argument in favor of their infallibility now. *** * See Appendix N. ** See Appendix O. *** See Appendix P.