The women of the United States receive "more consideration" and are being emancipated more rapidly than are the women of Europe; yet, in Europe, Christianity holds iron sway, while in America the people are free to accept or to reject its teachings; and in the United States, out of a population of seventy millions, but twenty-two millions have accepted it; and a large percentage of these are children, who have not arrived at the years of discretion, and foreigners from Christian Europe. The consideration extended to woman does not depend upon the teachings of the Bible, but upon the mental and material advancement of the men of a nation. Now if it can be proven that Bible teaching has inspired men to explore and to subdue new lands, to give to the world inventions, to build ships, railroads and telegraphs, to open mines, to construct foundries and factories, and to amass knowledge and wealth, then the Bible has been woman's best friend; for she receives most consideration where men have liberty of thought and of action, have prospered materially, builded homes, and have bank accounts.
The women in the slums of Christian London and New York receive no more consideration than the women in the slums of Hong Kong or Bombay. If the nations which give the most consideration to women do so because of their Christianity, then it logically follows that the more intensely Christian a class or an individual may be, the greater consideration will be shown to their women. The most intensely Christian people in Christendom are negroes; yet it is an incontrovertible fact that negro women receive less consideration, and are more wronged and abused, than any class on the earth. The women of the middle and upper classes in Bible lands receive consideration just in proportion to the amount of intelligence and worldly goods possessed by their male relatives, while the pauper classes are abused, subjected, and degraded in proportion to the ignorance and the poverty of the men of their class.
The Church is the channel through which Bible influence flows. Has the Church ever issued an edict that woman must be equal with man before the canon or the civil law, that her thoughts should be incorporated in creed or code, that she should own her own body and property in marriage, or have a legal claim to her children born in wedlock, which Christianity claims is a "sacrament" and one of the "holy mysteries"? Has the Church ever demanded that woman be educated beyond the Bible (and that interpreted for her) and the cook book, or given a chance in all the callings of life to earn an honest living? Is not the Church to-day a masculine hierarchy, with a female constituency, which holds woman in Bible lands in silence and in subjection?
No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to woman as is the Christian Church. It demands everything from her and gives her nothing in return. The history of the Church does not contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman with man. Yet it is claimed that women owe their advancement to the Bible. It would be quite as true to say that they owe their improved condition to the almanac or to the vernal equinox. Under Bible influence woman has been burned as a witch, sold in the shambles, reduced to a drudge and a pauper, and silenced and subjected before her ecclesiastical and marital law-givers. "She was first in the transgression, therefore keep her in subjection." These words of Paul have filled our whole civilization with a deadly virus, yet how strange is it that the average Christian woman holds the name of Paul above all others, and is oblivious to the fact that he has brought deeper shame, subjection, servitude and sorrow to woman than has any other human being in history.
The nations under Bible influence are the only drunken nations on the earth. The W. C. T. U. will certainly not claim that drunkenness elevates woman; indeed, its great work for our sex is a splendid protest against this idea. Throughout Christendom millions of wretched women wait in suspense and in terror for the return of drunken husbands, while in heathendom a drunkard's wife cannot be found unless a heathen husband is being Christianized by Christian whiskey. The Chinese women have their feet compressed, but, unlike Christian women, they do not need their feet to give broom drills or skirt dances for the "benefit of their church." The child-wives of India need to be rescued and protected, but no more than many adult wives in Bible lands need protection from drunken and brutal husbands. The heathen wife seeks death on her husband's funeral pyre, but the Christian wife is often sent to death by a bullet in her brain, or a knife in her heart.
It is said that "woman's ballot is unknown except where the Gospel of Christ has mellowed the hearts of men until they became willing to do women justice." justice through the ballot has been accorded only to the women of Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and far away New Zealand. In these States the people are honest, industrious and law-abiding; but the "influence of the Gospel of Christ," according to religious statistics, is so small it would take a search-warrant to find it, while Utah is full of Mormons and New Zealand is a convict dumping ground for Christian nations. Is this the extent of justice to women after the "influence of the Gospel of Christ has mellowed the hearts of men" for nineteen hundred years?
The fact is that woman has been elevated in spite of Bible influence. Every effort that woman has made to secure education has been challenged by popes, bishops, priests, moderators, conferences and college presidents, yet against all these protests she has battered down the doors of Christian colleges and is now studying the Bible of Science in conjunction with the Bible of the Christian religion. With increasing knowledge woman is founding her faith on reason and demonstrated truth, instead of taking it second-hand from priest, parson or presbyter.
Remove from Bible lands the busy brains and hands which have guided the plow and the locomotive, driven the machinery of the mine, the foundry, the factory, the home, the mental and the physical labor which have brought material prosperity, broadened the mind, subdued the brutal instincts, and humanized the race—remove all these and leave but the Bible and its influence, and where, let me, ask, would woman be to-day? Where, indeed, would man be? A crouching and cowering slave to the Bible doctrine of the Divine right of kings, living as the brutes of the field, as he did when Bible Christianity was at the zenith of its power. Wherever in Christian lands man has been a slave, woman has been the slave of a slave.
Imagine the condition of woman if to-day should be removed from Christian civilization the school, the steam engine, the smokestack and the printing press, and leave but the Scriptures, the steeple and the parson. Would Elizabeth Cady Stantons, Mary A. Livermores and Frances E. Willards be the products of this strictly Christian civilization?
Christianity has instilled into woman the canting falsehood that the women of all other religions are degraded and immoral. Through tyranny and falsehood alone is Christianity able to hold woman in subjection. To tell her the truth would rend the temple of faith in twain and strike terror to the heart of the priest at the altar. Nothing but the truth will set woman free. She should know that Christian England captures the Hindoo girl to act as a harlot to the British soldier, and that a Christian chaplain is commanded to see that she performs her duty. She should know that in Christian Austria the maiden must partake of the Holy Eucharist before she will be granted a license as a prostitute. She should know that Christian Europe and America trade upon the bodies, the hearts and the hopes of millions of wretched women, victims of ignorance and of poverty, and that the centres, of Christian civilization are seething cauldrons of immorality, dissipation and disease, which spread ruin and despair in the shadow of the loftiest cathedrals and palatial Christian temples.