“There you labour under a mistake. New Amazonians did not discard Christianity. It was Christianity which declined to help them. When New Amazonia was first peopled by the colonists from Teuto-Scotland, the adult colonists were, as you doubtless know, all women. It was the intention of these women to govern their State with as much success as was compatible with the rejection of conventionality and traditionary laws. It had hitherto been their lot to be excluded from a great proportion of national privileges, which had been usurped by the masculine sex for ages. In casting about for the principal causes of their limitations of fairplay, they found, them, or thought they did so, in the doctrines of Christianity. One of the principal Christian writers indeed, seemed to be quite as much bent upon insulting, humiliating, and subjugating woman, as he was upon spreading the Christian cause. New Amazonian leaders found that they could not take an active part in public affairs without violating all the rules laid down for woman’s guidance and man’s encouragement by the Apostle Paul. It was a case either of Christianity and reversion to Slavery, or a sort of Unitarianism and Freedom, and they did not hesitate long as to what choice to make. They were not likely, being intelligent beings, to inaugurate a retrogressive movement by instructing their boys in tenets which constantly preached the inferiority and subservience of women, especially as they believed St. Paul’s utterances on matters feminine to be dictated more by spite than by honest conviction.” “And what were their grounds for this belief?” “Their reasons are easily explained. We have it on reliable authority that Saul of Tarsus, whose parents were Greeks, not Jews, but who had himself adopted the Jewish persuasion, was a man of very violent passions and prejudices. He hated the Christians, and took delight in helping to exterminate them. It was when in Jerusalem, bent upon some such mission, that he was introduced to the daughter of the Jewish High Priest, and fell passionately in love with her. To his intense mortification, his proposal for her hand was rejected, and he henceforth hated both women and Jews, becoming enthusiastically Christian by way of a change.” “But, even if this be true, the fact that Paul is not believed in here would hardly account for the repudiation of the doctrines taught by the other apostles of Christianity.”