hat he would
give an address, and state the rights of woman as defined by the
Bible. Great allowance has been made by some of the speakers in
this Convention, on account of his ignorance, and certainly this
was charitable. But I heard this discourse. I heard him bring up
what is called the Apostolic prohibition, and the old Eastern
idea of the subjection of wives; but he kept out of view some of
the best ideas in the Scriptures.

Blame is often attached to the position in which woman is found.
I blame her not so much as I pity her. So circumscribed have been
her limits that she does not realize the misery of her condition.
Such dupes are men to custom that even servitude, the worst of
ills, comes to be thought a good, till down from sire to son it
is kept and guarded as a sacred thing. Woman's existence is
maintained by sufferance. The veneration of man has been
misdirected, the pulpit has been prostituted, the Bible has been
ill-used. It has been turned over and over as in every reform.
The temperance people have had to feel its supposed
denunciations. Then the anti-slavery, and now this reform has
met, and still continues to meet, passage after passage of the
Bible, never intended to be so used. Instead of taking the truths
of the Bible in corroboration of the right, the practice has
been, to turn over its pages to find example and authority for
the wrong, for the existing abuses of society. For the usage of
drinking wine, the example of the sensualist Solomon, is always
appealed to. In reference to our reform, even admitting that Paul
did mean preach, when he used that term, he did not say that the
recommendation of that time was to be applicable to the churches
of all after-time. We have been so long pinning our faith on
other people's sleeves that we ought to begin examining these
things daily ourselves, to see whether they are so; and we should
find on comparing text with text, that a very different
construction might be put upon them. Some of our early Quakers
not seeing how far they were to be carried, became Greek and
Hebrew scholars, and they found that the text would bear other
translations as well as other constructions. All Bible
commentators agree that the Church of Corinth, when the apostle
wrote, was in a state of great c