the Church and State as feeble and
inferior, rejected her counsels, and derided her authority in the
creation of those institutions of society to which not only she,
but her children are to be subject; although, if there be any
induction more striking than another it is this, that a child,
who is the offspring of the physical union of man and woman, can
only be truly educated and nurtured by institutions springing
from the unity of mental and moral elements in the father and
mother.

This universal ignoring of the feminine element pervades not only
the politics, but the religion of every country on earth. Men
worship, as their supreme God, only an embodiment of the
masculine element--"Power," whether in Jove or Jehovah; and ever
in the Christian Trinity or Unity, the same masculine ideal is
maintained. Jesus did, indeed, recognize the feminine element in
His emphatic declaration that "God is Love," but His professed
followers have "not so learned Him," for they not only declare
God to be a triune masculinity, but they have driven woman from
the pulpit, and would dispute with her the place at the cross and
the sepulchre.

The religions of antiquity permitted woman to be a priestess at
the expense of wifehood and maternity, but our Christian
Protestantism denies to her the mission of minister, even with
that penalty. It is true the Catholic Church does recognize women
among its divinities, and it might be a curious and instructive
inquiry, how far that Church owes its perpetuity, despite its
gigantic crimes and crushing despotism, to the recognition of
"Mary the mother of God." In its effort to perpetuate the
servitude of woman, as in other attempts to defend oppression
and falsehood, society has suborned the handmaids of progress,
Religion and Science, to justify its wickedness; the one to prove
inferiority from her organism, the other to add the weight of its
anathema against any effort at equality.

But Nature vindicates herself against the first, by presenting De
Stael, Margaret Fuller, and others; and to the cavilling bigot it
may be said that whoever declared that "man is the head of the
woman," if he designed to justify the present interpretation of
that expression, has forfeited all claim to the apostleship of a
religion w