wonderfully gifted Pandora into the world loaded with all the
evils which it was fated to endure. It was her destiny to be the
occasion of the fall, the instrument of doom; but her fortunes
are linked to the resurrection and life, as well as the suffering
and death of the race. Among the gifts of Pandora which had
otherwise been fatal, she brought hope which lay concealed after
all the others had flown abroad on their missions of mischief. In
our Sacred Story this point in the parable has a clear
explanation: "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's
head." If she brought death into the world, she brought forth a
Son who "taketh away the sins of the world.".... These myths,
whether received as simple facts, or poetic fiction, whose
oracles always reveal the deepest signification of facts, alike
indicate the eminent agency of woman in the fall and rising again
of the human image of the divine upon earth.

... From the marriage hour woman is presented only in a series of
dissolving views. First. She stands beside her husband radiant in
girlish beauty. She worships. One side of the lesson is well
learned, that of entire dependence. Not once has she dreamed that
there must be mutual dependence and separate fountains of
reciprocal life.... In the next scene the child wife appears
withering away from life as from the heart she is not large or
noble enough to fill--pining in the darkness of her home-life,
made only the deeper by her inactivity, ignorance, and
despair.... In another view she has passed the season of despair,
and appears as the heartless votary of fashion, a flirt, or that
most to be dreaded, most to be despised being, a married
coquette; at once seductive, heartless, and basely unprincipled;
or as beauty of person has faded away, she may be found turning
from these lighter styles of toys to a quiet kind of hand-maiden
piety and philanthropy.

... Marriage as it now exists is only a name, a form without a
soul, a bondage, legal and therefore honorable. Only equals can
make this relation. True marriage is a union of soul with soul, a
blending of two in one, without mastership or helpless
dependence. The true family is the central and supreme
institution among human societies. All other organizations,
whether of Church