Rome, who derived her religious code from paganized Egypt, added celibacy to the opportunities and inducements for the degradation of woman. Rome never attained the heights from which the Brahman priesthood plunged into debauchery. Even to-day in the festivals in the Brahman temples wholesale orgies of prostitution are sometimes found, as witnessed and recorded by Jacolliot. From the first, Brahman priests have married and reared families. Their degradation and debauchery, therefore, cannot be charged to their original "Divine Revelation," but to their corruption of it. I have given a few brief quotations among hundreds recorded by Jacolliot as to the respect and veneration accorded to woman in early Vedic times, and in the Laws of Manu. "The Brahman may not approach the altar of sacrifice _but with a soul pure, in a body undefiled_. "Spirituous liquors beget drunkenness, neglect of duty, and they profane prayer. "The antiquity of India stands forth to establish its priority of religious legislation in prohibiting to priests the use of spirituous liquors, and especially in forbidding the pleasures of love when they are about to offer sacrifice. "The woman whose words and thoughts and person are pure is a celestial balm. "Happy shall he be whose choice is approved by all the good. "It is ordained that a devotee shall choose a wife from his own class. "The Brahman who marries a woman who is not a virgin, who is a widow, or divorced by her husband, or who is not known as a virtuous woman, cannot be permitted to offer sacrifice, for he is impure, and nothing can cleanse him from his impurities." And Jacolliot adds, "It is not recorded, says the divine Manu, that a Brahman has ever, even by compulsion, married a girl of low class. "Let the Brahman espouse a Brahmine, says the Veda. "Let him take a well-formed virgin, of an agreeable name, of the graceful carriage of the swan, or of the young elephant, whose body is covered with light down, her hair fine, her teeth small, and her limbs charmingly graceful." Jacolliot compares these early Vedic injunctions with Leviticus, Chapter XXI, and the absurdities introduced by Moses as to a "crooked nose or a squint eye." Woman here in the West is just emerging from the slavery and degradation of ages, and she _ought_ to know that that degradation was not the handicap of barbaric and undeveloped races, so far as the Aryan race is concerned, but a demoralization and degradation instituted by priests, in the name of religion, through which they have sought to rule the world, and so far as institutional religions are concerned, woman has had to progress _in spite of them_. Without the aid and influence of woman to-day, neither Protestant nor Roman Church could exist at all, as witness almost any Sabbath service where women outnumber men often ten to one.