(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then Eve.
(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man.
(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man.
(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.
(6) The marriage relation. As the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands.
(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is Christ, but the head of the woman is man.
For this one sin alone—its insult and injustice to woman—we should never make our peace with the bible. Worse than all its miracles, fables, absurdities, immoralities, contradictions, indecencies, is its tyranny over woman because she is weak. This is unpardonable.
It is no defense to say that allowance must be made for the remote times in which these barbarities were committed. It is not the morality of the "times" but the morality of an infallible book that is under discussion. Moreover, why could not the people who daily saw God and heard from him, be at least as decent as their "heathen" neighbors? The Midianites, whose virgin daughters Moses ordered his followers to abduct, after all the rest of the inhabitants had been put to death, had sheltered Moses for forty years when he fled for his life from Egypt. * Their hospitality is repaid by Moses in this unspeakable fashion. Why could not Moses be as honorable and humane as the Midianites? Even by the admissions of the bible itself, the nations whom Jehovah ordered to be exterminated were very much more hospitable than the Jews. Had Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia or Persia followed the example of the Jews, there would not have been any Jews left in the world to-day. And the fact that, after long years of captivity in heathen countries, when permission was given the Jews to return to Jerusalem, many of them refused to do so, preferring a foreign country to their own, is decisive proof that the "heathen" did not treat the Jews so unmercifully as Jehovah wanted the Jews to treat the heathen. I can protest against the massacre of the Christians by the Turks, or of the Jews by the Christians, because I do not believe the bible is binding upon my conscience. But how can a Christian or a Jew plead for liberty of conscience? How can a Jew or a Christian protest against being massacred while hugging to his bosom a book which commands and approves of the most inhuman treatment of one people by another?
* Exodus ii, 15.