nts, however, offered a constant and embarrassing
criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women were fit to sit
upon the right hand of God--and they were often proving it, and forcing
the church to acknowledge it--then surely all women could not be as bad
as the books made them out. There thus arose the concept of the angelic
woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full length in the romances
of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the end was a sort of double
doctrine, first that women were devils and secondly that they were
angels. This preposterous dualism has merged, as we have seen, into a
compromise dogma in modern times. By that dogma it is held, on the one
hand, that women are unintelligent and immoral, and on the other
hand, that they are free from all those weaknesses of the flesh which
distinguish men. This, roughly speaking, is the notion of the average
male numskull today.

Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but with
the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore at bottom,
their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their
friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that have bound
them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women,
indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and less
religious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little if any
pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice, force on them by the
masculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their lowly
station, and a masculine feeling that church-going somehow keeps them
in order, and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When they
exhibit any genuine religious fervour, its sexual character is usually
so obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it. Women
never go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God in
the pulpit is an elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one finds
them driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over
the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage
up to grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement
before the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to assume, even without an
actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has worked the miracle is a fair
and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more aphrodisiacal than learned.
All the great preachers to women in modern times have been men