Farewell! there’s but one pang in death,
One only,—leaving thee!’
“With this, may be compared the speech of Alcestis in Euripides, when dying in the presence of her husband, under circumstances adapted to call forth all that power of expressing the tender emotions, for which Euripides has been thought to be distinguished.
“Under the influence of religion, we are acted upon by new motives, through the sense created within us, of the worth of our fellow-men. Religion invests them with a new character, strips off the disguise with which the accidents of mortality, imperfections, weaknesses, follies, miseries, and crimes hide their essential nature from our view, and presents them before us with all the interests and capacities of immortal beings. They who are dear to us are worthy of all love and self-devotion, worthy of affections unlimited by death or time. They are members with us of the imperishable family of God, in whose company we are to exist for ever, and with whom our union will become more entire, as we grow purer and more disinterested.
“Thus in later days there has been a growth of sentiments and affections, almost unknown before. Our better feelings toward our fellow-men have acquired far more strength, and assumed new forms. In other times, man has been comparatively an insulated being. Domestic life—that life in which now almost all our joys or sorrows are centred—was scarcely known to the ancients; and it has had but a sickly and artificial existence even in modern ages, through the operation of false notions of domestic government and discipline, and of the mutual relations of husband and wife, parents and children. Religion, by teaching us justly to estimate what is truly excellent in our nature, what is intellectual, moral, and ever-enduring, has given to woman the rank to which she is entitled. It has made her the friend of man; and our feelings are in harmony with the poet when he speaks of—
‘A perfect woman, nobly plann’d
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light.’
But man has never regarded woman with respect and true love, except so far as he has regarded her as a spiritual and immortal being. Without this, no conception can exist of that inseparable union which blends all the interests and affections of one being with those of another. The poetry of the ancients that expresses any sentiments toward the female sex is, with rare exceptions, of the grossest kind, sensual, coarse, indecent, brutal. We can pick out only a few passages from the mass, which shadow forth anything like real affection. The same character has continued to cleave to much of our modern poetry, rendering it at once pernicious and disgusting. But wherever the power of true religion has been felt, there woman, more disinterested, more pure, and more moral than man, has exerted a constant influence to raise the character of society. Where it has not been felt, woman has been treated as a mere creature of this earth, an object only of sensual passion, courted, wronged, and insulted; her character has sunk, and the infection of the evil has spread itself every where. It would be difficult, in as few words, to suggest to a reflecting mind a more melancholy picture of the state of society at Athens, than that of which Aristotle affords us a glimpse in a short passage of his ‘Art of Poetry,’ where he remarks, with his usual brevity and dryness, that ‘the manners (character) of a woman or slave may be good; though in general, perhaps, women are rather bad than good, and slaves altogether bad.’[454] Where women are thus estimated, the domestic charities, our best school of virtue, cannot exist; those affections which are at once the gentlest and the strongest have no place; nor will there be any true refinement, nor quick and generous feeling in the intercourse between man and man: the first and strongest link in the chain of human sympathy is wanting.