hood, muscular strength, pride, adventurousness, ambition, and self-assurance. These equipments for the contests of a public career tend to unwomanize a woman. Her genius is modesty, patience, reverence, submission, tender trust. Being out of politics, which is the transient sphere of some, is it not best that she keep out of it, and devote herself to morality, which is the permanent sphere of all? Here is furnished an honorable ground on which woman may be, not shut out of, but excused from, the province of government.

What is the ideal of perfect society? Is it a state where there is a universal contention for notice, power, and honor? Then let women enter that contest now. Is it a state where each is content with the personal fruition of his own powers, in harmony with the same enjoyment by all others? Then let women, by setting such an example of abstinence from the public realm of politics, draw men also to their true happiness, in the realm of home and morals. The latter must be the correct view, for this reason: only a few can be illustrious and govern; all can be good and obey; and the true ideal is that condition in which no government is needed, except the government of God. The eternal womanly quality is obedience the temporary manly quality is authority. The world will be redeemed, only when the former has subdued and transformed the latter into its own likeness; when man and woman, no longer master and servant, but equals, press forward together, in free obedience to a common sovereignty.

Turning from the authority of history to the authority of moral science, there is no reason for the enslavement of woman to man. This is not yet fully seen, because the historic type of woman as pure subject, of man as pure sovereign, has sunk so deeply into the imagination of both sexes. The Gentoo Code declared, "A woman ought to burn herself alive on the funeral pyre of her husband." Body and soul, she was a mere appendage to him. The Mosaic Code declared woman unclean eighty days after bearing a female child, but only forty days after bearing a male child. The passage of thousands of years had brought a degree of physical emancipation to her; but she still remained mentally ser

vile, when Katherine Parr said to her husband, Henry VIII., "Your majesty doth know right well, neither I myself am ignorant, what great imperfection and weakness, by our first creation, is allotted to us women, to be ordained and appointed as inferior and subject unto man as our head; and that, as God made man in his own likeness, even so hath he made woman of man, of whom and by whom she is to be governed, commanded, and directed." This type of unquestioning subjection and obedience is depicted by Chaucer, after Boccaccio, in his "Griselda," and by Tennyson in his "Enid." The husbands of these most lovely and womanly of women try their temper, their absolute subjectedness, by the most capricious, cruel, and wicked tests. They submit to every thing with unmurmuring sweetness and fortitude, with infinite humility. The true lesson of these charming stories is, that an inexhaustible self-abnegation and obedience is the most heavenly trait and power of human nature. But it is a perversion to limit the application to woman. Moral excellence is the same in man as in woman. It is an outrage to make that meek submission to wrong, which shows so divinely in her, a duty. And it is equally an outrage to make that autocratic authority of man over woman, which he so complacently assumes, a right. The progressive emancipation of woman, revealed in history, will go on until she wholly ceases to be, in any sense, "a mere appendage of man," and they are mutually as independent as they are mutually dependent.

It is very curious to study the extremes of dishonor and of honor, in which women, as such, have been held, at different periods, under various social conditions. In the Oriental world, in consequence of the character fostered in them by despotism, the triviality, ignorance, vanity, sensuality, jealousy, deceit, cunning, and fickleness, attending their mode of life, they have always, on the whole, been regarded by men with complacent condescension as toys, or with distrust and scorn as dangerous and vicious inferiors. In the Classic world, they were always treated as far inferior to the other sex, and prevailingly held up in literature in the most odious.

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light, the marks of all sorts of contemptuous satire. Strong examples of this abound in the Greek and Latin poets.

Eu

ripides was surnamed the woman-hater, from the scorn with which he depicts the sex. The comedies of Aristophanes are mercilessly satirical and sarcastic, in their portrayals of women his "Ecclesiazusæ" might be taken for a freshly painted ironical picture of the "Woman's-rights Movement" of to-day. In the Christian world, the pagan type of woman, thought of as lower and wickeder than man, bore for a long period an aggravated form, imparted by an intense theological dogma. The theologians, whose authority controlled the belief and sentiment of Christendom for many centuries, taught that woman by the seduction of Adam and the introduction of original sin, which led to the crucifixion of Christ— was the guiltiest and worst of human beings, the Temptress of Man and the Murderess of God. Hear how Tertullian raged against her: "She should always be veiled, clothed in mourning, and in rags; that the eye may see in her a penitent, drowned in tears, and atoning for the sin of having ruined the human race. Woman, thou art the gateway of Satan."

In the world of modern civilization, the leading tendency, as betokened by the highest literary productions, is in the opposite direction from that of the Oriental, Classic, and early Christian worlds. It expresses reverence for woman as a moral superior; inclines to exalt her as angelic, almost as divine. There is error, there is confusion, in both these extremes. The element of sex has no value in determining the merit or demerit of a human being. Neither man nor woman is to be either blamed or praised for being male or female. A woman is no worse than a man, unless her moral qualities are lower; she is no better than he, unless her character is better. The chivalrous or poetic impulse to exalt woman, as such, relatively above man, is as mistaken as the impulse to degrade her beneath him. Humanity is worshipful only as it exhibits worshipful attributes; and these attributes have the same moral rank, whether they appear on the masculine or on the feminine side. A woman, consequently, does not deserve to be honored above a man, simply

because she is a woman, but only as she has more than he of the highest qualities of humanity; and she disclaims her divinest gift when she becomes an egotist, clamoring for supremacy. Humble abnegation is at once her own crown, and the spell with which she is to redeem man. The moment she demands precedence, that crown crumbles from her brows in fragments of dark decay.*

The superiority increasingly ascribed to woman by fine minds in our era, -a trait conspicuous enough, when we look from Tibullus to Frauenlob, from Pindar to Patmore,

is often confusedly supposed to be her due, on account of some mysterious quality inherent in her mere femineity. It should be distinctly seen to be a simple consequence of the purer representation of goodness in her. This purer goodness is no matter of sex as such, but belongs to her by virtue of her personal renunciation of the struggle for precedence; her greater interior tenderness, modesty, spirit of sacrifice. Her mission, as the destined redemptress of society, is to set the example, and diffuse the spirit, of contented goodness, -goodness contenting itself with the universal growth of goodness. Now, in what other way can she ever fulfil this mission, except by attracting man likewise, through the influence of her example, to withdraw from the selfish battle for social distinction, and devote himself to the private attainment of personal perfection, and the public benefaction of his race? Therefore, that tendency of chivalry which led the troubadours and knights to install woman in the place of command, causing man to bow implicitly to her authority, is as erroneous as the state of things that preceded it. Neither is to command the other: both are to obey, and aid each other in obeying, what is intrinsically right and good. But

How finely this lesson is taught in the ancient Hindu epic, the "Mahabhárata." As Radhika walked with Krishna, her soul was elated with pride, and she thought herself better than he; and she said, "O my beloved! I am weary, and I pray you to carry me upon your shoulders." Krishna sat down and smiled, and beckoned to her to mount. But, when she stretched forth her hand, he vanished from her sight, and she remained alone, with outstretched hand. Then Radhika wept bitterly.

the chivalric transference of authority from man to woman is a striking instance of the propensity of human nature to oscillate from one extreme to the other before poising at the mean of truth, a propensity which has so many curious illustrations in history.

Some of the champions of the "Rights of Women," in our day, apparently commit the error of inverting the real desideratum, which is, to make men renounce and love like the finest women, - not to make women exact and fight like the coarsest men. They act as if they thought men were both better and better off than women, and were to be taken as models by them: as if they supposed the redemption of women was to be secured by their becoming and doing, as nearly as possible, what men are and do. If there are any who really believe thus, they certainly invert the truth. No amount of voting, or of any other externality, will ever bring the millennium. It would be a poor delusion to fancy that the millennium will come when women shall be as fully engaged in the frenzied strife for riches, honor, station, power, fame, as men in general now are. It will come only when men shall be as renouncingly withdrawn from that contest, as women in general now are. Instead of wanting to make women ambitious rivals and gladiators, we want to make men modest students of goodness for its own sake; disinterested aspirants, seeking to fulfil their destiny by perfecting their faculties and acquirements, without any invidious comparisons. Our hope lies in woman the saint, not in woman the amazon. Woman, as seen in the Mary who sat at the feet of Christ, brings a heavenly ministration to rescue man from every thing impure or discordant: woman, as seen in the Penthesilea who fought Achilles, offers man but a perverted reflection of himself.

The common belief, that human life began in a paradisal state, is a sentimental and mischievous error. The cradles of civilization are full of murder. First, for a period of unknown duration, raged the strife for precedence in physical power and its grossest symbols. In civilized nations, this strife is now reduced, for the most part, to boys and pugi