Here we have pain to alleviate, ignorance to dispel, innocence to protect, disease to master, and crime to restrain and prevent. Here we have the helpless to shield and guard and protect. Here we have homes to make happy, the hearts of husbands and wives to make glad, the light of love and trust to kindle in the eyes of children. Here is old age to cheer and console. Here are orphans to educate and protect, widows to comfort, and oppression to uproot.
There—nothing to do but look after yourself and manage your harp; nobody to help—all will be perfect; nothing to learn—all will be wise; no hearts to cheer—all will be happy. All that a mother will have to do if she gets a little tired practicing on her lyre and feels gloomy will be to just take a good look over the wall, and photograph on her eyes the picture of her husband and children freshly dipped in oil and put on the griddle, and she will come back to business perfectly satisfied, take up her song where she left off, and praise the Lamb for his infinite mercy. All eternity to learn how to fly round in a robe and keep time with the orchestra! Why a deaf man could learn to do that in fifty or sixty years, and then have all the rest of the time to spare.
We are here such a little while, there is so much to learn, there is so much to do, there is so much to undo, that no man can afford to waste his time on an infinite future of time, space, and leisure. Men cannot afford to lose your best energies. "God" can get on very well without them. Time is short, and needs are pressing; and this thing you know—you can keep busy doing good right here. If there is a hereafter, could there be a better preparation for it than that?
NOT WOMAN'S FRIEND.
After all that has preceded this page I need hardly do more with this count of the last claim of "Theological Fiction" than simply say, if the Bible is woman's best friend, then the clergy, without authority and in violation of the precepts of their own guide, have been her worst enemy, either through malice or ignorance; in either of which cases they are and have always been unfit to dictate, to lead opinion, or to receive a following as reliable guides for this world or the next.
If they have been so ignorant or so malicious for nearly nineteen hundred years as to thus systematically misconstrue their own authority—their own "revelation"—to the constant disadvantage of women (and the consequent enfeeblement of the race), surely they can claim no respect for their opinions and no confidence in their divine calling.* In trying to shield the Bible the clergy simply convict themselves.**
* See Appendix K.
** See Appendix L.
But I incline to the opinion that in the main this view of the case is unfair to the clergy, and that they have followed, in spirit if not literally, the dictates of the Bible as a whole. It is undoubtedly true that the Bible throughout holds woman as an inferior in both mental and moral characteristics; and upon this understanding of it the Fathers built the Church and crystallized the laws.
The Fathers of the Church were as a rule a bad lot themselves. All contemporaneous history and all internal evidence prove this fact: and when we remember that the "Prophets" were almost to a man polygamists; that their belief and practices in this regard were of the order and type of Mormondom to-day, and for the same reasons; that they were slave-holders and slave-stealers; that they believed in a God of infinite cruelty and revenge—of arbitrary will and reasonless barbarity; and that they were licentious and brutal beyond description; it will be easy to understand the position which such men—with these beliefs, practices, mentality, and moral degradation—would accord to women. Every Bible of every people; every history of every race showing like civilization, will show you like results.*