The Woman's Bible

by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

These things are too shocking for pure Christian women to know, so they expend their prayers and pelf on the "poor heathen" who have never heard that Adam ate an apple, or that the whale swallowed Jonah. Christianity feeds and fattens on the sentiment and the credulity of women. It slanders the women of India, of China and of Japan that it may rob the woman of Europe and of America. Dr. Simmons, of the National Hospital at Yokohama, who has lived in the Orient for thirty- five years, says:

"The family in Japan is the cornerstone of the nation. The father and the mother are regarded with reverence. Politeness and self-restraint are instilled into children, and an uncivil word is rarely heard. The Japanese are truthful and honest. The wife has equal influence with the husband; while divorce is rarely heard of in Oriental lands; and laws are more stringent protecting the chastity of women."

O that women could learn the truth! The laws of the Orient are against trafficking in young girls, but Christian England, which has an iron hand on the throat of India and a sword thrust into her heart, carries on a lively trade in native and foreign women, to be the prey of the Christian soldier, who makes way for the Christian missionary. Here, in Christian America, marriageable young women are trotted off to church, the theatre or the ball, and practically set up for sale in the market of holy matrimony; and the Christian minister, for a consideration, seals the "Divine mystery." The Church would indignantly deny that it is a marriage mart, but denial does not throttle the truth.

Truth makes her way slowly but surely, because the eternities are hers. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the greatest liberator of our time, has, with magnificent courage, pressed into humanity's Thermopylae, and turned the light on the superstitions which have visited cruelties and wrongs on woman, and this, too, under a system which claims to extend "great consideration" to the Mothers of the Race. O women of Christendom! will ye not seek the truth? Leave the priestly mendicants who demand your devotion and your dollars, leave to their religion the heathen women on the banks of the Yangtse-Kiang and the Ganges, and turn your eyes to millions of your enslaved, toiling, struggling sisters in Christendom whom it is claimed the Bible has elevated; and remember that these are the victims upon whom the "glad feet" of the Gospel have been trampling for two thousand years.

Versailles, Ky.

Josephine K. Henry.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization. Whether we regard the work as custodian of the profoundest secrets of the "ancient mysteries," a spiritual book trebly veiled, or as the physical and religious history of the world in its most material forms, its interpretation by the Church, by the State, and by society has ever been prejudicial to the best interests of humanity. Science, art, inventions, reforms of existing wrongs, all, all have been opposed upon its authority. That even the most enlightened nations are not yet out of barbarism is due to the teachings of the Bible.

From "Thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness of anything in heaven above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth," down to "A woman shall not speak in church, but shall ask her husband at home," the tendency of the Bible has been to crush out aspiration, to deaden human faculties, and to humiliate mankind. From Adam's plaint, "The woman gave me and I did eat," down to Christ's "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" the tendency of the Bible has been degradation of the divinest half of humanity—woman. Even the Christian Church itself is not based upon Christ as a savior, but upon its own teachings that woman brought sin into the world, a theory in direct contradiction, not alone to the mysteries, but to spiritual truth. But our present quest is not what the mystic or the spiritual character of the Bible may be; we are investigating its influence upon woman under Judaism and Christianity, and pronounce it evil.

Matilda Joslyn Gage.

There is nothing tending to show that the women spoken of in the Bible were superior to the ones we know. There are to-day millions of women making coats for their sons; hundreds of thousands of women, true, not simply to innocent people falsely accused, but to criminals. Many a loving heart is as true to the gallows as Mary was to the cross. There are hundreds of thousands of women accepting poverty and want and dishonor for the love they bear unworthy men; hundreds and thousands— hundreds and thousands—working day and night, with strained eyes and tired hands, for husbands and children—clothed in rags, housed in huts and hovels, hoping day after day for the Angel of Death. There are thousands of women in Christian England working in iron, laboring in the fields and toiling in the mines. There are hundreds and thousands in Europe, everywhere, doing the work of men—deformed by toil, and who would become simply wild and ferocious beasts, except for the love they bear for home and child.