ersons to carry
on what she had begun. But the opinion of a man's world still prefers to
credit her success to some mysterious angelical quality, unstatable in
lucid terms and having no more reality than the divine inspiration of an
archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and accurate intelligence is thus
conveniently put upon the table, and the amour propre of man is kept
inviolate. To confess frankly that she had more sense than any male
Englishman of her generation would be to utter a truth too harsh to be
bearable.

The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already
discussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct--that they submit
to the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a powerful effort
of the will, and with the sole object of discharging their duty to
posterity. It would be impossible to go into this delusion with proper
candour and at due length in a work designed for reading aloud in the
domestic circle; all I can do is to refer the student to the books of
any competent authority on the psychology of sex, say Ellis, or to the
confidences (if they are obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of his
acquaintance.

39. Women as Christians

The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favourable
to women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when their
very possession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rival
theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set value upon
their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a lady
formerly in public life, was among His regular advisers. Mariolatry is
thus by no means the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestant
theologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainly
discernible in the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes actually
invented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the
elements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women's inferiority,
the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for
sound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had
to support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of
a hazardous and ignominious business. The result was the deliberate
organization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack
of responsibility and general looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of
devil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. The
appearance of women sai