with your enemies: 'Vengeance is mine saith the
Lord'--'I will repay.'"

The Christian religion teaches better things; better than its expositors
and upholders have ever understood--much less practised.

The teaching of "Love your enemies, do good unto them that hate you, and
serve them that despitefully use you and persecute you," has too
often resulted, when practised at all, in a sentimental negation; a
pathetically useless attitude of non-resistance. You might as well base
a religion on a feather pillow!

The advice given was active; direct; concrete. "_Love!_" Love is not
non-resistance. "Do good!" Doing good is not non-resistance. "Serve!"
Service is not non-resistance.

Again we have an overwhelming proof of the far-reaching effects of
our androcentric culture. Consider it once more. Here is one by nature
combative and desirous, and not by nature intended to monopolize the
management of his species. He assumes to be not only the leader, but the
whole thing--to be humanity itself, and to see in woman as Grant Allen
so clearly put it "Not only not the race; she is not even half the race,
but a subspecies, told off for purposes of reproduction merely."

Under this monstrous assumption, his sex-attributes wholly identified
with his human attributes, and overshadowing them, he has imprinted on
every human institution the tastes and tendencies of the male. As a male
he fought, as a male human being he fought more, and deified fighting;
and in a culture based on desire and combat, loud with strident
self-expression, there could be but slow acceptance of the more human
methods urged by Christianity. "It is a religion for slaves and women!"
said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the same
thing.) "It is a religion for slaves and women" says the advocate of the
Superman.

Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food
and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the
temples, the aqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the
tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and
beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite
of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real
industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and
the women.

A religion which had attractions for the real human type is not
therefore to be utterly despised by the male.

In modern history we may w