Call to us blindly, their woes interceding.
The non-Christian religions offer no light in life and no hope in death. The bitter cry of the Hindoo widow’s prayer is, “O God, let no more women be born in this land.” The horrors of heathenism are unknown in Christian lands. What makes the difference? We have clearly shown in these pages that it is the teaching of the Bible, and this one fact alone stamps the book as divine. It has God for its Author, and, from Genesis to Revelation, it blesses and elevates women.
Why does paganism oppress womanhood? Because these monstrous systems are dominated by Satan, and knowing as he must, that woman stands at the fountain of the race, he poisons and corrupts the very sources of life. For the truth of this one needs only to compare Christian with heathen lands. Compare America with its happy Christian homes, with India in whose cloistered zenanas are millions of widows, many of them under ten years of age, and doomed to a living death—must sleep on the ground, feed on herbs, and practice rigid mortification. Before Christianity entered that land, the horrors of the suttee (the burning alive of the widow with her dead husband), the sacrificing of infants to the River Ganges, the slaying of young men and women in Hindu temples to appease Kali, the god of the soil, the “Car of Juggernaut,” rolling over hundreds of beings annually, and crushing them to death, the burning alive of lepers, the hastening of the death of a parent by the children in carrying the former to the River Ganges and there, on the banks, filling the afflicted one’s mouth with sand and water are left to die, the public exhibition of voluntary starvation on the part of Hindu devotees,—all these terrible practices, once so popular in India, have passed away since the missionary has planted his foot upon the soil. To-day none of these things can be found, and India’s voice, as well as the voice of all Christendom, can go up to God in praise that these things no longer exist there. And what has taken place in India, is also fast taking place in China and Africa. Surely, the Christian woman needs to press her Bible to her heart, and love it as she loves her God, for, were it not for this blessed book, her condition would be no better than is the condition of woman in the lands where Buddhism, Confucianism and Mohammedanism have crushed out of her all that is worth having, and even denies that she has a soul. It must be seen that such systems are incapable of elevating womanhood.
The thought uppermost in our mind, when we set out to write these pages was, to show that God created man and woman as equals, that Christ came to save our whole humanity, and that Christianity is the true friend of woman. How beautiful is all this in contrast with the cruelties of heathenism. See how patiently Jesus talks with a lone woman by Jacob’s well, how tenderly he speaks to the woman who sobbed out her sorrow for her sins at His feet, how compassionately He says to the woman for whose blood her accusers had clamored, after He had silenced them, “Go, and sin no more.” And, to the credit of head and heart, be it said, woman has appreciated her Saviour, and in many ways shown her gratitude. Perhaps there is no more beautiful and touching incident in the life of our Lord than that recorded by Luke, where women “ministered unto Him of their substance.”
Finally, if any have been helped to a better understanding and appreciation of the Bible by the perusal of these pages, and have been lifted nearer to the heart of God, we shall feel that our labors have not been in vain.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.