the most cruel, tests.
They submit to every thing with unmurmuring sweetness and humility.
The true lesson of these charming stories is, that an inexhaustible
self-abnegation and obedience forms 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 ceases to be, in any sense, "a mere
appendage of man," and they become 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, they have always been
regarded by men with complacent condescension as toys, or with
distrust and scorn as vicious inferiors. In the Classic world, they
were always treated as far inferior to the other sex, and held up in
literature in the most odious light. Euripides was surnamed the
woman-hater, from the scorn with which he depicts the sex. The
comedies of Aristophanes are mercilessly sarcastic, in their
portrayals of women: his "Ecclesia" might be taken for a freshly
painted ironical picture of the "Woman's-rights Movement" of to-day.
And what a frightful picture of the Roman women Juvenal paints in his
"Sixth Satire "! 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 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."

The condition of women in the East has been unfavorably affected by
polygamy, despotism, stagnant ignorance, their close confinem