“If the husband of a virtuous woman be ugly, of good or bad disposition, diseased, fiendish, irascible, or a drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind, deaf, hot-tempered, poor, extremely covetous, a slanderer, cowardly, perfidious, and immoral, nevertheless she ought to worship him as God, with mind, speech, and person. “The wife who gives an angry answer to her husband will become a village pariah dog; she will also become a jackal, and live in an uninhabited desert. “The woman who eats sweetmeats without sharing them with her husband will become a hen-owl, living in a hollow tree.—(Conf. Note VI., 8.) “The woman who walks alone without her husband will become a filth-eating village sow. “The woman who speaks disrespectfully to her husband will be dumb in the next incarnation. “The woman who hates her husband’s relations will become from birth to birth a musk-rat, living in filth. “She who is always jealous of her husband’s concubine will be childless in the next incarnation.” To illustrate the blessed result of a wife’s subserviency, a story is told of “the great reward that came to the wife of an ill-tempered, diseased, and wicked Brahmin, who served her husband with a slavish obedience, and even went the length of carrying him on her own shoulders to visit his mistress.” So quotes the _Woman’s Journal_ of Boston, Mass., and says in comment thereon:—“The British Government in India has bound itself not to interfere with the religion of the natives, but it certainly ought not to inculcate in Government schools the worst doctrines of heathenism.” Yet, again, are these Hindoo, or Japanese, or Chinese doctrines simply the precepts of “heathenism” alone? Buckle quotes for us the following passage from the Nonconformist “Fergusson on the Epistles,” 1656, p. 242:—“There is not any husband to whom this honour of submission is not due. No personal infirmity, frowardness of nature, no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of it.” Much the same teaching is continued a century later in the noted Dr. Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters”; and again, hideously true is the picture which Mill has to draw, in 1869:—“Above all, a female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife; however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to, though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him, he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.... No amount of ill-usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.”—(“The Subjection of Women,” pp. 57, 59.)