Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
We have passed through one Gethsemane because of our refusal to
co-operate with the Deity in His purpose to establish justice and
liberty on this continent. It took a hundred years and a Civil
War to evolve the principle in our nation that all men were
created free and equal. Will it require another century and
another Civil War before there is secured to humanity the
God-given inalienable right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness?" The most superficial observer can see elements at
work, a confusion of forces, that can only be wiped out in blood,
unless some new, unifying power is brought into Government. No
class was ever known to extend a right or share the application
of a just principle as long as it could safely retain these
exclusively for itself.
We have no quarrel with men. They are grand and just and noble in
exact proportion as their spiritual nature is exalted. As sure
as you live down low to the animal that is in you, will the
animal dominate your nature. Woman is the first to recognize the
Divine. When God was incarnated in humanity, when the Word was
made flesh and born of a woman, the arsenal of Heaven was
exhausted to redeem the race....
Woman is your last resource, and she will not fail you. I have
faith that humanity is to be perfected. Examine the record for
yourselves. I do not agree with the view of some of our divines.
We find the Creator taking a survey, and man is the only creation
he finds imperfect. Therefore a helpmeet is created for him.
According to accepted theology the first thing that helpmeet does
is to precipitate him into sin. I have unbounded faith in the
plans of God and in His ability to carry them out, and when He
said He would make a helpmeet I believe He did it, and that Eve
helped Adam, gave him an impetus toward perfection, instead of
causing him to fall. Man was a noble animal and endowed with
intellectual ability, but Eve found him a moral infant and tried
to teach him to discriminate between good and evil. That is the
first and greatest good which comes to anybody, and Adam, instead
of falling down when he ate the apple, rose up. There is no moral
or spiritual growth possible without being able to discern good
from evil. Adam was an animal superior to all others that
preceded him, but it needed a woman to quicken his spiritual
perceptions.
Eve having taken it upon herself to teach man to know the
difference between good and evil, the responsibility rests upon
woman to teach man to choose the good and refuse the evil. She
will do this if she has freedom of opportunity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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