God has planted in every breast a passion for congenial society, and made its wholesome play essential for the fulness of happiness; but depraved passions have rendered the claims and duties of both sexes ambiguous, and disarranged the harmonies of the first creation. As society becomes corrupt, power assumes authority over weakness; and they who ought to help, begin to hinder. Upon this principle women have been held in a state of social degradation in all countries in which Christianity has been wholly unknown. The Egyptians decreed it to be indecent in women to go abroad without shoes, and threatened with death any one who should make shoes for them. Among Celtic nations, the labours of the field, as well as domestic toil, devolved on the women; which evidently originated in the general impression of their inferiority in the scale of existence. The domestic life of the Greeks exhibit unquestionable evidences of barbarity in the treatment of women. At no time were they entrusted with any knowledge of their husbands’ affairs, and they were totally excluded from mixed society. According to the laws of the Romans, the wife was in servitude; though she had in name the rights of a citizen. In savage, superstitious, and Mahometan countries, the condition of females justifies the exclamation of an ancient philosopher, who thanked God that _he was born a man and not a woman_. It is evident that the social condition of women, destitute of the light of revelation, is inferior to that of men. But under the influence of even a precursory and imperfect system of the true religion, their glory emerges partially to view. Still under the Jewish theocracy, the Levitical law appointed a variety of regulations which evinced their imperfect emancipation from social inferiority. Polygamy and concubinage prevailed even in pious families in these olden times. The doctrine of vows, also, in the case of daughters, wives, and widows, proves the subordination of the female sex. It is Christianity that has raised women above the state of barbaric degradation, Mahometan slavery, and Jewish subjection, and assigned to them their proper place in society.