These facts are truly impressive indicating as they do the tremendous hold which the Roman ecclesiastical system has gained over the hearts and minds of men. Very striking, too, is the contrast between all this magnificence and pomp and manifest aspiration for temporal power on the part of one who claims to be the representative on earth of the “meek and lowly Jesus,” and the poverty, unostentation and self-denial of the “Son of Man,” who had not where to lay his head.
This jubilee is an event of great moment to the XIX century, at once a warning and a proof of the life and strength of that scheme which has for its real end, not alone the spiritual but also the temporal subjugation of the entire human race. Since Italy under King Humbert secured its release from the temporal power, thus severing the last authoritative grasp of the pope upon temporal kingdoms, the attempt has been sedulously made to create a fictitious sympathy for the pope under claim of his imprisonment in the Vatican. Nor at the least supreme moment of his pride and glorification did the pope forget to call attention of the world to his temporal claims, by a refusal to receive the offered gifts of the king and queen who occupy the worldly throne he maintains to be especially his own.[57]
The doctrine of original sin and woman as the original sinner, transplanted from Judaism into Christianity by Paul in the statement that “Adam, first created, was not first in sin,” was developed to its present evil proportions by the early Christian Fathers. To St. Augustine, whose youth was spent in company with the most degraded of womankind, is the world indebted for the full development of the doctrine of original sin. Taught as one of the most sacred mysteries of religion, which to doubt or to question was to hazard eternal damnation, it at once exerted a most powerful and repressing influence upon woman, fastening upon her a bondage which the civilization of the nineteenth century has not been able to cast off.
Reverence for the ancient in customs, habits of life, law, religion, is the strongest and most pernicious obstacle to advancing civilization. To this doctrine of woman’s created inferiority[58] and original sin we can trace those irregularities which for many centuries filled the Church with shame, for practices more obscene than the orgies of Babylon or Corinth, and which dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in pagan countries—a darkness upon which the most searching efforts of historians cast scarcely one ray of light—a darkness so profound that from the seventh to the eleventh century no individual thought can be traced.
Rev. Charles Kingsley, a canon of the English Church, declared that from the third to the fifteenth centuries, Christianity had been swamped by hysteria in the practice of all those nameless orgies which made a by-word of Corinth during the first century. Every evil was traced to woman. A curious old black letter volume published in London, 1632, declares that “the reason why women have no control in Parliament, why they make no laws, consent to none, abrogate none, is their original sin.”
Chapter Four
Marquette
The minds of people having been corrupted through centuries by the doctrines of the Church in regard to woman, it became an easy step for the State to aid in her degradation. The system of feudalism arising from the theory that warfare was the normal condition of man, still oppressed woman by bringing into power a class of men accustomed to deeds of violence, who found their chief pleasure in the sufferings of others. To be a woman appealed to no instinct of tenderness in this class. To be a woman was not to be protected unless such woman held power in her own right, or acted in place of some feudal lord. The whole body of villeins and serfs were under absolute dominion of the feudal lords. They were regarded as possessing no rights of their own; the priests had control of their souls, the lord, of their bodies. But it was not upon the male serfs that the greatest oppression fell. Although the tillage of the soil, the care of swine and cattle was theirs, the masters claiming half or more of everything, even to one-half of the wool shorn from the flock,[1] and all exactions upon them were great while their sense of security was slight, it was upon their wives and daughters that the greatest outrages were inflicted. It was a pastime of the castle retainers to fall upon peaceful villages, to the consternation of the women, who were struck, tortured, and made the sport of ribald soldiers.[2] “Serfs of the body,” they had no protection. The vilest outrages were perpetrated by the feudal lords under the name of “rights.” Women were taught by church and state alike that the feudal lord or seigneur had a right to them not only as against themselves, but as against any claim of husband or father. The custom known by a variety of names, but more modernly as “marchetta,” or “marquette,” compelled newly married women to a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the feudal lord for from one to three days after their marriage,[3] and from this custom, the oldest son of the serf was held as the son of the lord, “as perchance it was he who begot him.”