ade an everlasting battle. This
combat theory we may follow later into our common notions of discipline,
government, law and punishment; here is it enough to see its painful
effects in this primary field of ethics and religion?

The third essential male trait of self-expression we may follow from
its innocent natural form in strutting cock or stamping stag up to the
characteristics we label vanity and pride. The degradation of women
in forcing them to adopt masculine methods of personal decoration as
a means of livelihood, has carried with the concomitant of personal
vanity: but to this day and at their worst we do not find in women the
_naive_ exultant glow of pride which swells the bosom of the men who
march in procession with brass bands, in full regalia of any sort, so
that it be gorgeous, exhibiting their glories to all.

It is this purely masculine spirit which has given to our early concepts
of Deity the unadmirable qualities of boundless pride and a thirst for
constant praise and prostrate admiration, characteristics certainly
unbefitting any noble idea of God. Desire, combat and self-expression
all have had their unavoidable influence on masculine religions. What
deified Maternity a purely feminine culture might have put forth we do
not know, having had none such. Women are generally credited with as
much moral sense as men, and as much religious instinct; but so far it
has had small power to modify our prevailing creeds.

As a matter of fact, no special sex attributes should have any weight in
our ideas of right and wrong. Ethics and religion are distinctly human
concerns; they belong to us as social factors, not as physical ones.
As we learn to recognize our humanness, and to leave our sex
characteristics where they belong, we shall at last learn something
about ethics as a simple and practical science, and see that religions
grow as the mind grows to formulate them.

If anyone seeks for a clear, simple, easily grasped proof of our ethics,
it is to be found in a popular proverb. Struggling upward from beast and
savage into humanness, man has seen, reverenced, and striven to attain
various human virtues.

He was willing to check many primitive impulses, to change many
barbarous habits, to manifest newer, nobler powers. Much he would
concede to Humanness, but not his sex--that was beyond the range of
Ethics or Religion. By the state of what he calls "morals," and the laws
he makes to regulate them, by his